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Compensation Watch ’21: So Many People Are Bailing That KPMG UK Had to Change Its Bonus Structure

Posted on by Adrienne Gonzalez

Attrition is the word on everyone’s lips these days, and you can bet that the ongoing Big 4 exodus is keeping plenty of partners up at night. Given the aforementioned stress-related insomnia, surely firm leaders are spending their extra awake hours coming up with creative, generous ways to hold on to the staff they have and signal to unhappy grunts at other firms that they are taking extraordinary steps to pay their people what they’re worth, revenue be damned. Right? RIGHT??

If you chortled heartily at the suggestion that firms will start paying people more in order to keep them, congratulations, you win a prize. Not an actual prize. Just the prestige that comes with winning a prize.

A tipster informs us that in a recent firmwide call, KPMG UK announced its solution to large numbers of people leaving. Spoiler: it doesn’t involve bags of money. More like keeping the bags of money hostage until loyalty has been sufficiently proven. At least it’s still the carrot; they haven’t yet gotten desperate enough to deploy the stick.

Recently we’ve had UK wide calls about comp in UK audit as issues with attrition are starting to cause big issues, due to unsustainably high numbers leaving post qualification.

The solution has been to remove all annual performance related bonuses for junior staff, and replace them with payments a few years after qualifying – subject to 2 year clawbacks.

As part of the initiative they’ve also released pay for all the different grades and office bandings! (Attached)

And here are the slides provided by our lovely tipster, who obviously ignored the directive from KPMG UK to stop talking to the media. Thanks, friend!

For your convenience and to facilitate easy searching for KPMG UK salaries, I’ve put everything into a table.

KPMG UK Audit pay:

Our tipster adds that they are “very interested to hear/see what other UK firms are doing about high levels of attrition” as are we so if anyone else out there is in possession of new salary data and would like to share with the class, give us a shout. Hell, give us a shout if you just want to complain, whatever.

Photo by Anthony from Pexels

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KPMG Partner-cum-Poet Resists Urge to Create Verse on His Blackberry

Believe it or not, employees of Big 4 firms possess talents that have nothing to do with elaborate spreadsheets, coffee and bagel consumption or fantasy football.

A perfect example of this would be Arun Kumar, a “battle-tested” partner in KPMG’s Silicon Valley office. Mr Kumar is a poet, who recently published a collection of 39 poems entitled “Plain Truths.” And regardless of his almost certain reliance on his BlackBerry, he manages to set it aside for the sake of his art.

Kumar, a partner at accounting and consulting giant KPMG, knows another kind of poetry. A poetry of nature and relationships, of whimsy and wisdom, a poetry of words that can be written on planes or between planes or in the quiet of the evening, but never, ever, on a BlackBerry.

“A poem, for me, is visual,” Kumar says at his Mountain View office. “Seeing it is quite important, so I can’t imagine — on a BlackBerry it’s not the same.”

So not only is Kumar a man of professional integrity, he also is one of artistic integrity, resisting the eyestrain and temptation to double-thumb inspiring words on to a 2.5 inch screen that may or may not be lost after he drops it one too many times.

But even more surprising (and disappointing) than his commitment to his craft, is Kumar’s ability to avoid penning poems related to his job. “Most [poems] are far removed from his work,” the article states, despite the undeniable muse that is life inside the House of Klynveld.

Arun Kumar, of Silicon Valley s KPMG office, finds poetry on the human side of the ledger [Mercury News]

More KPMG Comp News: For Some In Chicago, Expectations Are More or Less Met

Some of you may have heard enough KPMG compensation news but judging by traffic patterns, most of you have not. And reports are still coming in, so it’d be a disservice to keep you in the dark.

The latest news out of Chicago:

This info is for Chicago, Audit. Most of us had our talks Thursday or Friday, however I hear that some are still continuing into Monday.

A2 to SA1, SP+ rating, received 10% raise and 2% bonus. Same level, EP rating, received 13% raise and 5% bonus. I am also finding out that SP vs. SP+ has no difference at all. This is based on a salary of $56,000 which was our original starting salary (also included a $5000 sign on bonus) as we received no raise last year. This is pretty much in line with what the now S2’s received over the past couple years, as they got 5% raise after their first year and 5% raise for being promoted to senior last year when everyone’s salaries “stayed flat” as my partner put it. What I would really like to know is what A1’s to A2’s received, as last year they had the same starting salary and bonus as what I began with, so they were essentially making more than A2’s for an entire year due to the bonus.

SA 2 to SA3, EP rating, 8% raise and 5% bonus. My managers also don’t seem to excited, but I obviously did not ask them what their actual numbers are.

I believe everyone on my team feels this is what they expected raise wise, but are rather disappointed with the bonuses. Some additional information, raise numbers are consistent across all business units within the office.

It’s also our understanding that convos are still going on in New York this week, so continue to keep us updated.

One thought on “Compensation Watch ’21: So Many People Are Bailing That KPMG UK Had to Change Its Bonus Structure”

  1. Joined KPMG 8 years ago in audit, have left now.
    The salary for Band 1 during my time was as follows:
    E1 – £27,500
    E2 – £29,500
    E3 – £36,500
    D1 – £47,500

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