Company: Deloitte
Date: 2016-03-04
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Pressure for hours; staff working on admin instead of tax
Pros: Good benefits.  Lots of paid time off (that you won't be able to use, but you can cash out when you quit).   You work with smart people and good clients.
Cons: Way too much pressure and micromanagement around hours.  Instead of trusting people to get their work done, they have to forecast their hours in StaffTrak (an Excel monstrosity), and then record their actual hours in DTE (a web-based hell that doesn't get any kind of feed or have any useful copy/paste functionality).  Then you get emails from some resource manager you've never met if your hours don't line up because you were sick for a day, or your father died, or just because there was a lot of admin that week, like an RFP coming in.   The pressure for hours leads to inefficiency, padded time, things taking too long and being done poorly because people are exhausted.  The intense pressure doesn't increase productivity, just write-offs.
 
Tax staff are expected to draft and coordinate engagement letters, fee agreements with foreign offices, etc.  In theory you could have someone in India do it, but it's scary enough to delegate it to a US staff who doesn't know what they're doing.  Having to coordinate it all through email and deal with time zones would just make it worse.  The firm really needs US-based billing coordinators for this.  No one went to school for five years and took the CPA exam so they could do purely administrative work outside their comfort zone.  Of course they charge their time for this, which creates pressure to try to find a way to bill for it.
 
Too much virtual training on technical topics rather than live/in-person training.  Advice to students/candidates - ask how much of your training will be live versus virtual.  If virtual, you'll be expected to multi-task, but also expected to pick up everything taught during the training.  Better yet, reconsider public accounting entirely.