The financial times
EY has fired dozens of US staff for what the accounting and consulting firm called cheating on professional training courses, sparking an internal debate about business ethics and the limits of multitasking.
The dismissals took place last week after an investigation found that some employees had attended more than one online training class at a time during the “EY Ignite Learning Week” in May. Several of the fired employees told the Financial Times they did not believe they were violating EY policy and were just trying to take advantage of interesting sessions that ranged from “How strong is your digital brand in the marketplace?” to “Conversing with AI, one prompt at a time”.
The sessions counted towards the 40 continuing professional education credits that EY required employees to complete in a year. The firm determined that watching two at a time amounted to an ethical breach. “Our core values of integrity and ethics are at the forefront of everything we do,” EY said. “Appropriate disciplinary action was recently taken in a small number of cases where individuals were found to be in violation of our global code of conduct and US learning policy.”
The Big Four firms have been taking a tougher approach to policing the professional training of their staff after a series of cheating scandals. The issue is particularly sensitive at EY, which in 2022 paid the largest-ever fine for such lapses — $100mn to the US Securities and Exchange Commission — after hundreds of accounting staff shared answers on professional tests, including ethics exams, and firm leaders withheld details from regulators.
One consultant who was fired last Friday said there was no warning that watching multiple sessions simultaneously was not allowed. “Their emails marketing EY Ignite actually encouraged us to join as many sessions as our schedule allowed,” the person told the FT. “We all work with three monitors.
I was hoping to hear new ideas that I could bring to the table to separate myself from others.” A second person who lost their job said EY “breeds a culture of multitasking”, adding:
“If you are forced to bill 45 hours a week and do many more hours of internal work, how can it not?”
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