According to a report, EY fired dozens of US employees for taking multiple online training courses at one time.
The “Big Four” accounting firms claimed that employees had committed fraud, while employees said that the incident was a result of the task-heavy work culture encouraged by the firm.
The company fired the employees last week after an investigation found that some employees attended more than one online training class at a time during “EY Ignite Learning Week” in May. According to Financial Times,
Several fired employees told the Financial Times that they did not feel they were breaking company policy by attending multiple trainings at once.
Training courses – including “How strong is your digital brand in the market?” Topics like. and “Interacting with AI, One Signal at a Time” – count among the 40 continuing professional education credits that EY employees are required to complete in a year.
But EY said taking on more than one training at a time violates the company’s ethical policies.
“At EY, our core values of integrity and ethics are at the forefront of everything we do,” the firm told The Post in a statement. “EY US has terminated the individuals who, after a thorough investigation, were found to have violated our Global Code of Conduct and US Learning Policy.”
Despite the company’s history, employees said EY’s response was excessive and inappropriate, claiming they had no idea that watching multiple trainings at the same time was against company policy.
“Their emails marketing EY Ignite actually encouraged us to attend as many sessions as we could on our schedule,” one employee who was fired on Friday told the Financial Times. “We work with all three monitors. I was hoping to hear new ideas that I could bring to the table to differentiate myself from others.
Another fired employee said the company itself “breeds a culture of multitasking.”
“If you are forced to bill 45 hours a week and do many more hours of internal work, how can it not be?” The person said.
A third employee pointed out the hypocrisy of punishing employees for multitasking.
“I know a fellow who will work two jobs [client] The employee takes calls and turns his camera on and off depending on who he’s talking to,” the employee said. “If this is immoral, then that is immoral.”
EY is likely sensitive to controversial ethics violations because it came into the spotlight just a few years ago.
In 2022, EY admitted that hundreds of its employees committed fraud on their certified public accountant examinations – and that the company hid key evidence of tampering from regulators.
According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the accounting firm was ordered to pay a whopping $100 million fine – the largest ever imposed against an audit firm.
Some employees turned to an anonymous messaging service called Fishbowl to review and boast about their companies.
Employees questioned whether EY bore any responsibility for the multitasking scandal, as its system allowed multiple training sessions to be opened simultaneously on Zoom and counted overlapping course credits.
Another fishbowl user called EY’s response “absolutely bizarre”.
The user wrote, “Maybe lower their rating, cut bonuses, or even delay promos, but terminating them effective immediately is cruel.” “If it was so important, implement better systems.”
The company has since changed its language for future EY Ignite training weeks.
“There are no other learnings you should learn while completing this activity,” EY wrote in an email to employees ahead of a training event in August.
