Company: KPMG
Date: 2010-08-31
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former

Local Hong Kong management style hide behind big global name
Pros: Structured Career Progression
Provides good training support for you to get a HKICPA qualification.
Well known international brand
Opportunity to learn about different businesses
Earn resilience to working condition
Opportunity to jump to another company
Cons: MAJOR

-Operation
1) Structured career progression attracts people with little ambition - everyone is encouraged to think inside the box
2) Employee review system has management overrides - even if you are favorably reviewed on every engagement, a person who is on the wrong side of department head will still receive poor performance review and thus, lower salary
3) Combining factors 1 and 2, many middle managers gripe about their line of work is mostly forcing associates to work for free and to please the department head in whatever his whims
4) Behind a beautiful brand lay a byzantine information system that forces non-value added paperwork that we can not bill to job if overrun - more work (2010)
5)(Industrial Markets) Partners focus on cost cutting rather than increasing revenue - there are only a few partners who go out to bring business. Other partners just micromanage engagements and continuously increase audit costs (that we hide from our bottom-line anyway because no one is allowed to input real time used). Some partners after having problems with engagements extend audit work extensively but is unwilling to record the work or pay the staff.

-Staff
6) Avg work hours 100hr/wk non-peak 120+hr/wk peak.  Local-style partner abuse the international brand to implicitly have managers force associates to work for free until 4am but document work hours finishing at 6pm (free staff!)
7) Many colleagues begin to have health problems in year 2, most leave by year 4. There is a culture of active discouragement of work-life balance despite a superficial focus on paper.

-Culture
8) The fact that audit is an industry based on ethic, the daily operation is morally wrong considering the promotion of values stated about and its extensive acceptance.

MINOR

-Partner
1) General English is mediocre especially up to partner level for local partners, and no intention to improve soft skills beyond paper.
2) Does not follow KAM (audit methodology). Add anything as she/he pleases.
3) God-like partner hierarchy discourage escalation of risk-issues and promotes sycophants
4) Poor management skills across the board. Management skills actually induce snicker as there is a common understanding that staff turnover is "Market condition."
5) Partners do not support the engagement teams. They put us at clients and let us take all the blame for decisions that partners make. we follow their directions and if we get complains, it is still our problem. 
6)Partners do not help us negotiate better terms. While we hear about other firms treasuring their staff, in order to please our clients our partners sometimes ask us to do client's accounting tasks, a big NONO for conflict of interest! 
6)Accepts below-acceptable fee engagements and always use excuses such as "strategic engagement" that has low margins and transfer the costs to having the staff working for free.

Culture
7)Low morale (its already a minor issue compared with above!) because we are thoroughly convinced that management will take every loophole to pay us less.  
8)Do not mention internal transfer unless you want to quit. They "lose face". They meaning everyone who is superior to your seniority.

Operations
9) Paper in 2010? We uses reams and reams of paper and pretend that we are green. Managers and Partners are unwilling to do eAudit and asks explicitly to print the paper out despite policy of eAudit.