Company: KPMG
Date: 2019-01-09
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Audit Associate
Pros: - Ability to utilise big 4 chartered accountant in future job searches. 
- Access to variety of clients and industries. 
- Pay improved significantly during my time at KPMG.
Cons: - Extremely toxic work culture with hallmarks of an old boys club in which the majority of partners resist change due to nostalgia and a sense of "we had it much worse when we were at your level, so why are you moaning". 
- Considerable lack of planning from management across the board. Many decisions taken such as required work processes are heavily flawed but required. Complete lack of understanding or empathy from management regarding millennials which is at the root of many cultural issues such as work life balance, work from home policy, dress policy. 
- Automatic promotions up to manager level which results in an environment in which those that can tolerate the extreme demands of the job or who lack the desire for change are promoted and reinforce the culture in a vicious circle. 
- Insane work hours expected and demanded, often leading to bullying. Complete lack of a human touch where employees are worked to exhaustion leading to illness and are disregarded unless the work is complete. 
- Staff are treated like farm animals where personal needs and desires are completely disregarded in order to maximise revenue. As revenue is based on jobs completed and staff costs are fixed (no overtime) this heavily incentivises KPMG to maximise the number of jobs for each employee and limit the hours on each job. This often results in employees working across multiple jobs at once. Employees will often be told on the day that their entire plans have changed and that they are required in a completely different location, often hours away with zero regard to the employee. 
- Management continue to beat the drum of quality following the multitude of reports and bad publicity indicting KPMG for poor audits. However, management refuse to solve the underlying, foundational problems such as those listed above and instead come up with new processes that take hours to complete, add zero to the actual quality of the audit but may look good to regulators. 
- Staff turnover is horrendous for all reasons listed above. This has resulted in management recruiting across the globe with a seemingly very low bar. Due to the lack of quality of hires, this places additional stress on more junior members of staff. 
- Vast majority of weeks are spent working with completely different members of staff from highly diverse backgrounds and little commodore. This makes the day to day operations of the job incredible boring and difficult.