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EY Tells Staff to Get Ready for Some Cuts After the Everest Embarrassment

road sign that says bump

We are still working on a more detailed post-mortem of the Project Everest collapse and our guesses for what comes next but in the meantime, check out what The Guardian ran this morning.

EY has reportedly told UK staff to brace for a wave of cuts, after the business spent $600m (£480m) globally preparing for a now-scrapped breakup of its operations.

Bosses at the accounting firm told staff during a phone call on Wednesday that it felt like a “low point” for the business, and admitted they were “disappointed and embarrassed” by the deal’s collapse.

Yeah, Andy Baldwin should be especially disappointed and embarrassed. Tremendously. He’s the one who said “it may come to timing point, so our plan is that we will continue to what we call soft separation next year, and continue to start to run these two businesses separately, albeit they will continue to be part of the single enterprise of EY” in December.

While it was not immediately clear how the costs would be spread across its global operations and over time, UK bosses said they would start cutting costs from July.

“We have inefficiencies in our business, which we can start to address now so we are already working on reducing our costs,” the EY’s UK managing partner for financial services, Anna Anthony, reportedly said on the call.

Start cutting costs? They’ve been cutting costs since last year. While EY has been somewhat open about belt tightening since Everest was first announced last spring, we’ve also heard of secret layoffs, hiring freezes, and of course the whole thing with mid-year bonuses that people are still angry about. How much tighter can the belt get?

The question is: will we see vocal pro-Everest leadership get drawn and quartered before the fallout trickles down to the lower level grunts? Are there even any spare grunts to cut? Will the drawings and quarterings be publicized??🤞

EY tells UK staff to expect cuts after breakup failure [The Guardian]

6 thoughts on “EY Tells Staff to Get Ready for Some Cuts After the Everest Embarrassment

  1. There’s a least a dozen high-level partners who should be shown the door – this will save some real money. #1 on this list is Carmine Di Sibio. #2 is Anna Anthony, who says a lot of stupid stuff. Let’s get the real show on the road – EY partners, how long will you wait? $600 million is a lot of money to waste.

  2. EY spend an awful lot of money on internal events for staff and flying staff from different countries to jollies in different jurisdictions. I wouldn’t be surprised if these are toned down. Next up has to be support staff. I can’t see 24 hour graphics support in London lasting. There’s also some very dubious ‘client account manager roles’ which are bound to be chopped. A cull in HR must be on the cards as well? Come on EY Insiders, spill the beans.

  3. Utterly embarrassing … and these leaders are touted to be the best in the world! It’s a joke I think. The staffs in this firm works incredibly hard and long hours and what do they get … salary cut almost no mid year bonus for quite a few. And whose fault is it ? The big leaders of this firm. I had been with ey for a few years. One of the higher up leaders mentioned once during yearly appraisal that once people get in big 4, it’s difficult for them to get an equivalent career outside of the big 4, she was pretty happy about this situation as all the staffs would be at these “big” leaders mercy. This is the lowest I have seen coming from any sort of business leaders. And these firms are full of them.

  4. Just got off a brutal all hands call. Just awful. 5% job reduction coming, but when? who? “will be done within by the end of the fiscal year” (June 30). Really?

    Insanely bad. I’ve had 400 messages from my team in the last hour, all of them basically “am I screwed”?

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