KPMG UK is set to fire more than 500 staff in a redundancies round hitting the auditing industry, reports have suggested.
The Big Four consultancy is set to fire staff across its advisory arm in the UK as well as the audit business, which will be more heavily affected.
Consultancy bosses reportedly told staff on Friday that some 440 assistant manager roles in the audit business would be cut, according to Bloomberg. It has also been reported that 120 roles across the advisory arm would be slashed.
Assistant managers in auditing are relatively junior positions in which qualifications in accounting were secured three years ago.
People working across public sector work would not be affected and would address a fall in revenue across auditing, a report in The Sunday Times said.
A statement from KPMG UK said: “In our audit business, alongside hiring for growth, we expect to see a regular pattern of natural attrition. But current market conditions mean our attrition rates are very low within certain parts of our audit population, which is why we are proposing to right-size those areas.
“This isn’t a decision we take lightly, and we will support our people throughout this consultation.”
KPMG job woes
One person told the Financial Times that cuts to the advisory businesses were “pretty devastating” while senior executives said they were worried about the pipeline.
Cuts could affect around one in 20 auditing jobs and one in 50 advisory jobs.
The firm employs more than thousands of people though Big Four companies have come under scrutiny over slashing graduate and junior level intake.
KPMG made the steepest cuts in 2023 out of Deloitte, EY and PwC.
It has also gone through several iterations of job cuts in recent years as executives eye up the opportunities from further AI usage, which has threatened key jobs across accounting and other professional services tasks focused on admin and spreadsheet crunching.
Auditors have had a hard few months as bosses have doubled down on a drive for cost reduction.
The firm told its own auditor Grant Thornton that it wanted to pay less as KPMG urged it to pass on cost savings from an AI rollout.
