Last week, Deloitte US told government-facing staff to remove pronouns from their email signatures in reaction to the “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing” executive order signed by President Trump on January 20.
Now KPMG, a small potatoes federal contractor compared to Deloitte, is doing a little diversity, equity, and inclusion housekeeping of its own according to Financial Times.
KPMG US has pulled years of reports on its diversity, equity and inclusion programmes from its website after becoming the latest professional services firm to scrap DEI goals in the wake of Donald Trump’s election
The Big Four accounting and consulting firm deleted the annual “transparency reports” it has published since 2020 that described its effort to increase the representation of women and minorities at all levels of the organisation.
According to USASpending data, KPMG LLP was awarded $406.1 million from 469 contract transactions with the federal government in 2024, $227.41 million of which (55.99% of their total take for the year) came from the Department of Defense.
Per FT, Chair and Chief Executive Officer Paul Knopp sent an email out to all staff that said, in part, “the legal landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts has been shifting, via executive orders and in the courts.” Thus the scrubbing.
As part of the shifting legal landscape littered with executive orders and court activity, KPMG has nixed the Accelerate 2025 initiative. In 2020, Paul Knopp proudly touted the program as an “audacious five-year strategy to drive meaningful change at KPMG” in an internal email to all his people and later on LinkedIn. Here’s part of what he said:
ACCELERATE 2025 will be a targeted exercise to tackle one essential dimension of the overall I&D agenda – namely, ensuring that more individuals from underrepresented groups choose KPMG as their employer of choice, build careers at KPMG, and advance to leadership positions within our firm and within the profession. ACCELERATE 2025 is focused on our people – recruiting the best talent, developing that talent, and promoting that talent through our ranks – and is intended to ensure that we set and achieve an ambitious goal for 2025. I have asked my management team and a task force of others to take the next three months to develop an audacious plan to ensure that, by 2025, the firm and the firm’s leaders look a lot more like America than we do today. ACCELERATE 2025 will launch on July 1, importantly on the first day of my tenure as the next Chair and CEO of our firm and appropriately during the week of Independence Day when the promise of our country is on full display.
As part of Accelerate 2025, leaders were expected to show progress toward these goals and data was published for public consumption:
Our leaders will be responsible for measurable progress, and that accountability must cascade throughout management. We also commit to publishing relevant information so that our people and the public can hold our feet to the fire. We intend to establish KPMG as a market leader, and we only can do that through transparency and an openness to constructive engagement both within the firm and with external stakeholders.
Although Accelerate 2025 will be brought to a close, Knopp said in his email to staff that KPMG will “continue our work to expand our aperture for recruiting talent, to create more transparency and consistency of experience for career navigation, and to promote an inclusive environment where everyone is comfortable speaking up.”
I may have some of KPMG’s old transparency reports and/or screenshots of the data saved in the many gigabytes of accounting firm garbage collected on my hard drives, phones, and cloud storage over the years, will dig them up and share if I’ve got them.
Money talks – the non-Woke employees couldn’t do it (and they were terminated and/or ostracized), but they did not have the bucks. The Federal Gov’t does and the bucks butter the partners’ bread. No more Woke – now all races and genders will be given the same opportunities. They are Woke until it affects their pocketbook – bye Woke.
Yup. The Big4’s only value was money. Anything threat to that, whether real or perceived, gets the boot in a heartbeat.
We will not forget what they did and how they aggressively jumped on every disgusting left wing trend.
“Disgusting” but I bet you refuse to acknowledge the actions of said president lol
Good for KPMG. If DEI really was intended for diversity, equity, and inclusion, there would have been no outcry. But Trump called it out for what it is, a racist and sexist policy. It’s about time for all of these DEI hires to be re-evaluated on their actual merits and not meaningless attributes.
People who are so elated about other people being trashed or fired you might want to pump your brakes because you could be next !! Trump is not done dismantling the country yet ! These companies who “quietly dismantle DEI weren’t really committed anyway 🙄
Deborah, where were you when the elitists were taking away the manufacturing jobs? You may not know any blue collar workers as they aren’t attending your cocktail parties and can’t afford buying their rugrats designer clothes. Trump and Musk are purging this elitism from our federal government.