In a post on Reddit nine days ago entitled, “I got fired with no severance from big 4,” someone wrote, “I got fired. It was because I was doing a separate online course during a in class training that wasn’t even applicable to my sector so I’m not getting severance.
“Any advice on what to do next and how to find job listings would be great,” the post continued. “I want to do a couple more years of public accounting for experience so anything towards that would be great. I’m an fso [financial services office] auditor staff 2 with one year experience. I don’t know where to start or what the next steps are for me. I’m really lost any advice would be great.”
The reasoning behind their dismissal was met with skepticism from some people who commented on the post. “So now that we have the rosey story, why were you actually fired?” wrote one person. “There has got to be more to the story,” wrote another person. “Yea this isn’t true💀 what really happened?” asked another.
Then on Oct. 22, the Financial Times reported that EY had fired dozens of U.S. staff last week after an investigation found that some employees had attended more than one online training class at a time during the “EY Ignite Learning Week” in May.
The Big Four accounting firm said taking the online training courses concurrently was an ethical breach.
“Our core values of integrity and ethics are at the forefront of everything we do,” EY told the Financial Times in a statement. “Appropriate disciplinary action was recently taken in a small number of cases where individuals were found to be in violation of our global code of conduct and U.S. learning policy.”
According to FT, several of the fired employees didn’t believe they were violating EY policy and were just trying to take advantage of interesting sessions, which included topics on digital branding and artificial intelligence.
The sessions counted toward the 40 continuing professional education credits that EY requires employees to complete in a year. The firm determined that watching two at a time amounted to an ethical breach, FT reported.
The punishment seemed disproportionate to the alleged wrongdoing, some of the fired staffers told FT.
“Their emails marketing EY Ignite actually encouraged us to join as many sessions as our schedule allowed. We all work with three monitors. I was hoping to hear new ideas that I could bring to the table to separate myself from others,” one person said.
Another said EY “breeds a culture of multitasking. “If you are forced to bill 45 hours a week and do many more hours of internal work, how can it not?”
Once the article from FT went live on Tuesday, some on Reddit became more sympathetic toward the original poster’s plight. “I was just reading about this. It would be super frustrating to be let go over something like this, especially given OPs reasoning of the training just not being relevant to them,” someone commented. Another said the situation was a “pretty weak reason to lay OP off.” That person also added, “Big 4 firms have loads of data on their employees and they know where to look to find a justification to let someone go.”
Another commenter said that even though they agree that you shouldn’t screw around with professional training, “I will say, the staff who said ‘EY promotes a culture of multitasking’ is spot on. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do the work that is being assigned so corners get cut. Partners have no patience so you better answer them even if you’re in a client call!”
A discussion about the firings also spread over to professional business and career community platform Fishbowl. Some commenters mentioned the $100 million fine EY received from the Securities and Exchange Commission in June 2022 after an investigation revealed that hundreds of the accounting firm’s auditors had cheated on mandatory ethics exams and internal CPE courses for several years.
“If you are taking 2 courses at once, you are not fully completing either,” one person who claims to work at EY wrote. “I read the [FT] article and heard about it before I read the article. That is clearly against the policy. If they don’t understand that after being told a hundred times how serious EY is in policing learning after the last fiasco, they paid the price for being ignorant.”
Later in that thread, that same person from EY wrote, “EY was previously fined 100M for people cheating on learning. People found cheating then were fired so this is not something new. EY has warned everyone over and over that there is zero tolerance for this. It is a violation of ethics policy and puts the firm at risk. It is absolutely a fireable offense.”
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Tags: Accounting, Firm Management, Human Resources, Payroll
