I am not sure the accounting professions even come close that in terms of income, with the accompanying holiday time…the doctors yes they definitely pay their dues.…but the also get amazing rewards.…I am not sure the same can be said the the bean counting professionals…in public practice.…

There are many more rewarding wayss to earn a living. The archaic system currently in place smacks of a fuedulist mentality.

I am a first year senior and am still learning. Due to high turnover at my office, we are simply thrown on large engagements even though management knows that we may not be ready for such responsibility. I do not mind the challenge. However, it becomes an issue when management expects us to complete the assigned engagements in fewer hours than prior year (even though in prior year the job was completed by a more experienced senior). Currently, at my office all our experienced seniors have left. There are seven first year seniors. Most of us feel very overwhelmed. Management involvement on most engagements is minimal.

The economy in my city is not doing well. There are three big accounting firms here. These accounting firms have to compete for clients. They are willing to lower their fees to get clients. However, the partners expect good recovery on their jobs. The budgets for the jobs are unrealistic. As a senior, I am expected to complete my job within the budgeted hours so the partner will achieve the expected recovery. If I do not complete the job in the expected hours, it reflects in the review I receive from management. I am not the only one dealing with this. Almost every single senior in my office is going through it. Most of us deal with it by eating our time. At the same time, the Office Managing Partner is putting pressure on the staff to increase our chargeable hours. The issue is that if we are working more hours than we report. As a result the number of chargeable hours reported will far less than expected. It is a lose or lose situation. I am sure that everyone in public practice has faced this problem at some point.

In October, I had a discussion with our “People Leader” at KPMG. He gave me positive feedback on my work with the company over the last year. I brought up the challenges that I am facing with managing my work and personal life. I told him that currently there are personal issues in my life that need some of my time after work. He said he will discuss it with my Performance Manager and they will sit down with me over lunch to discuss how I can achieve work-life balance. I did not hear back from the “People Leader”. After a couple of weeks, I dropped by his office and reminded him of this meeting we were supposed to have. He responded by telling me he will arrange something the following week. Another week passes by and I hear nothing. I send him an email and he again tells me “No problem. We will meet next week.” And again, I did not hear back from him. Come on, this is the “People Leader” at KPMG. Being a little bit more vocal than others, I reported the problem to an associate partner. He suggested I put together a group of us and complain. I have gathered all senior and will be meeting with management in a couple of weeks. We hope to address:
– Unrealistic budgets;
– The issue of seniors and junior staff almost forced to eat time; and
– The lack of work-life balance.

I highly doubt anything will come out of it. I am sure management knows how to respond to these issues in a manner that they can buy some more time and have us deal with this BS a little longer. Then there will be a wave of turnover and the same thing will happen to the new employees.

I am hoping that someone who has been in public practice for some time can suggest ways to deal with these issues.

I suppose it really depends on which area you’re in — and what your local office is like. If you’re compatible and even friends with your co-workers, it’s a totally different story.

And if you’re clever — and well supported, you’ll have dinner way more often than once a month, and either with your own friends on your own time, or with work friends and still in an enjoyable setting.

I dunno how many would actually accept 80–90 hours. Half that is normal, as I’ve written before.
http://krupo.ca/archive/2008/01/04/how-many-hours-do-you-have-to-work.aspx

Otherwise, you should probably be in i-banking.

To be honest, I am generally of the opinion that, if you don’t like the job, you should quit. In fact, that’s precisely why I quit my job at a Big 4 firm in California after only 3 months.

However, most Western nations have employment standards regulating the number of hours an employee should have to work, and I can’t believe that you’d just say “80 or 90 hours a week is the job.” If there is enough work to do 80 or 90 hours a week, that is a sure sign that the employer should hire more employees. If it’s a matter of busy season, they are certainly smart enough to hire contractors, or figure out a way of spreading out the work around the year better.

In my experience, it is just trickle-down incompetence. As work is passed down from upper management, it gets more and more delayed, until the staff and senior staff get stuck working weekends just because their superiors couldn’t get the work to them with enough time to complete it.

The fact that this is a case involving an administrative assistant makes it all the more absurd.

In California, for instance, there are class action suits against PwC and Deloitte because non-CPA (CA) accountants were required to work overtime. According to most interpretations of the law, not having your CPA means that you’re not exercising professional judgement and hence not exempt from being paid overtime wages.

What really gets me is that these companies think the “perks” of the job should compensate you for your extra hours. It is a genius proposal; once a month everyone has a really nice dinner with all the perks, all the alcohol you can drink, and so on. But in the end it only amounts to $100 or $150 per employee per month. It is good as team-building, and makes employees feel valued far more than the extra $150 per month on the paycheck would. But really, it’s for people who are bad at math. Get a higher-paying job and go out to dinner once a month with people you ACTUALLY like.

I really feel that the big accounting firms are like cults. They mistreat their employees 95% of the time, then the 5% of the time they get great “perks” makes them feel valued. The “work-life balance” mantra is repeated over and over again, making employees somehow IMPRESSED with the fact that the company allows a Senior Manager to work 4 10-hour days because she has a family. Wow, how flexible! Employees work and play with the same people so they’d feel ostracized if they ever broke away from the groupthink. Everyone at every level of the company seemed convinced that, while they could make more in industry, once they make that next promotion, they’ll be SET. But it never seemed to be true, no matter how high up they moved in the company.

I’m sorry, but there’s something FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG with a company that forces employees to bill far more than 40 hours a week, for at least several months out of the year, then use the cop-out that, hey, “it’s busy season, nothing we can do about it despite our millions of dollars in resources.” Why on earth should you make 50, 60, 70 hours per week worth of billables for a company and only be paid for 40 hours? Yeah, it’s not an hourly job, but the salaries are no better than other 40 hour per week jobs.

I could not be happier since I quit Deloitte over a year ago. I got a shorter commute, bosses who respect me and leave me alone to do my work, better equipment, no stuffy dress code, coworkers of diverse interests, and best of all, a 35% pay increase!

The way the accounting firms treat employees only seems good from the inside. From the outside it truly does look like a cult.

I read through site, and it seems like firms with lots of non-CPA students could face some trouble (that’s criterion 1 — you’re not a professional).

Criterion 2 is where, if you’re working on anything half-way decent in your day job, the class action lawsuit will fail miserably: “Making the decisions about the kind or scope of information to gather in connection with an audit, and how that information should be interpreted or applied, might well constitute work of a “professional” nature.”

A. Interns are most likely to fall into that category. But they’re coddled in the best, and simulteanously perhaps worst sense of the word. If you’re getting nailed with work as an intern, you chose the wrong place.
B. The lawsuit aims to gather staff and seniors. Staff get strict instructions, but that’s because they’re learning what you’re doing. I’d consider that akin to a Management Trainee. You may be a trainee, with all the attendant lack of freedoms, but (by Canadian standards, anyway) I don’t see that being reason to rule out professional status.

Seniors, on the other hand, better be making intelligent decisions or else they’re just tick-a-form/rollforward-last-year’s-file audit-monkeys and not intelligent professionals.

Would any self-respecting professional admit to being a follow-the-crowd audit-monkey? [A bit harsh, but, eh, it’s true.]