Men Accountants earn 60% more than Women

Source: FinancialDirector.co.uk

Male accountants over 45 earn 60% more than female counterparts, study reveals

The pay-gap between male and female accountants over 45 has stretched to 60%, a new study has found.

The average basic salary for a male accountant over 45 is £98,400, while their female colleagues’ average is £60,500, according to a Career Benchmarking Study released by the ICAEW and recruiters Robert Half.

This difference increased in the past year, with women aged 46-55 seeing their wages drop by an average of 10% from last year’s figures, compared with just a 1% drop for males.

However, for younger accountants the difference is much smaller. Females under 30 receive an average wage of £47,300 (an increase of 3% from the previous year) while the average male salary is only 4% higher at £49,300 (a decrease of 5% from the previous year).

Michael Izza, chief executive of the ICAEW, said: “Our studies show that to attract and retain female talent, it is also vital to meet employee expectations regarding career progression and work-life balance.”

SG Comment: Whilst the above article provides quite revealing stats on male/female salaries, it doesn't attempt to explain why there appears to be a wide gulf between male/female salaries at equivalent grades, particulary for ages above 30. This should be incredibly obvious - a lot of women leave the market to have children, and then resume their careers later on. Of course, a women that has taken 3-5 years out of the market to have a family will be re-employed on a lower salary level than an equivalent man that has stayed in the market, that makes sense and is the case. Conversely, I think it is also the case that, in the majority of situations, women that don't have career breaks to have a family stay at the same salary levels as men, which again is not factored into the above study.

2010: Tax employment market, so far

By Simon Godley

Coming into this year, I was quietly optimistic - I had a sense there was going to be more activity in the market, particularly compared to the deathly market of 2009. However, the market now seems broadly the same as the majority of last year. That said, I am writing this during half-term, and I think a lot of the market could be taking a deserved break with their children, hence not many calls being returned.

I have recently made the following observations:

* The interim tax / contract market is not good at all. Most contractors who have come to the end of a contract from late 2008 onwards to date have found it enormously difficult to find a new contract.

* The permanent market is very slow. It feels that the permanent market is slightly better than the interim market. However roles are generally appearing if a key member of the team is leaving, and the hiring manager can get the approval to replace, which in some cases is denied. Or if, by bringing a tax person in-house, will lead to a net cost reduction.

* Recruitment tends to be slightly more buoyant in very specialist areas of the market e.g. VAT / transfer pricing.

I guess generally the message is that the market is prepared to recruit for replacement for key people, but not yet at the stage of recruiting for growth. That could still be some time away.

Having said all that, the market does still 'feel' better than 2009, but not yet mended.

More Big 4 tax appointments from in-house market

Source: Tax Careers

There are new faces in KPMG's tax practice following the appointment of Angus Wilson and Darren Mellor-Clark as Tax Partners.

Wilson, former European Head of Tax and acting European CFO at Babcock & Brown, joins the firm's infrastructure tax group.

Mellor-Clark, who was global lead for VAT and Sales taxes at UBS, joins KPMG's financial services practice as an Associate Partner.

Caitriona Hunt, joint head of corporate tax and head of the business services tax practice at KPMG in the UK, said: "These are important, strategic hires to our business. Our practice is enjoying strong growth in key areas, and these appointments will significantly enhance our capabilities in these parts of the tax practice"

SG comment: Within the last 12 months, there has been a spate of senior in-house tax professionals, particularly from banks, making the move to London Big 4 firms at Partner level. Whilst this makes good sense for the tax execs making this sort of career move, I find it quite surprising that the Big 4 have brought so many new Tax Partners given the general business and economic environment. Of course, bringing in senior tax expertise from industry / banking can be very valuable to the Big 4 practice, in that it immediately increases their client network in a particular sector (eg VAT / Funds), and the individuals themselves bring extremely valuable experience from the buyers perspective ie buyer of tax services. The downside, however, is that I sense the (new) Tax Partners coming in have got the enormous task of bringing in high tax fees from what is now a much smaller and increasingly fiercely competitive market. Very strong selling skills I imagine will be the order of the day.

KPMG makes further cuts in UK tax practice

Source: AccountancyAge.com

KPMG plans to cut jobs in its UK tax department in response to the recession and a slump in demand for merger and acquisition-related tax advice.

The UK’s third biggest accounting firm emailed UK staff today to tell them that it needs to cut jobs in its tax and people services department in the UK.

In an email to staff Richard Bennison, chief operating officer at KPMG, told staff it needed to cut the jobs in response to a changing market for tax services.

An industry source said that a couple of hundred jobs could be cut. A spokesman for KPMG confirmed that the firm planned to cut jobs in its UK tax practice, but declined to give a likely figure for job cuts. He said that it was still consulting staff.

Earlier this year, KPMG offered UK staff the chance to do a four-day working week, or take extended unpaid leave, in an effort to avoid redundancies if the economy deteriorated further.

The accountancy profession has been hit by a wave of redundancies over the past year. Firms including Deloitte, Grant Thornton and PKF have announced plans to cut hundreds of jobs in expectation of slower revenue growth this year.

Thousands of redundancies in financial services have cut the amount of advisory work on offer, while merger and acquisition activity has also slowed dramatically.

SG Comment: This appears to be the next phase, effectively 2nd round of heavy cost cutting, from one of the Big 4 firm's tax function. Although in the case of KPMG, their clever tactic was to lose cost and not people in their first round of cuts, by putting people into 4 days per week contracts. From my initial warning note Credit Crunch - Impact on Tax Jobs in Sept 2007, we have now seen a few waves of job cuts in the tax market, the first round with the Big 4 taking place in December 2008. There have been whole teams of tax structuring people (not in-house tax) cut from some of the investment banks, and in-house tax teams across industry / commerce have generally had to make some reductions, although quite small, on average shaving c.5-10% of staff from a tax team. This is a generalism as I think a lot of in-house tax teams have remained the same size, as I predicted back in September 2007. My estimation is that we are now approx 12-15 months away from companies being able to recruit more freely for growth, although I suspect it could take longer as I think that these 'green shoots' that I keep hearing about could be quite classic false dawn.

Happy New Year...but not a happy tax market

By Simon Godley

Returning into this New Year (2009), we are seeing what was completed expected - a pretty dead recruitment market. On speaking to a number of Heads of Tax across commerce & industry, there is next to zero appetite to recruit additional tax staff. This is largely because the vast majority of commercial organisations have a recruitment freeze, thereby making it impossible to approve any recruitment. In some cases, if the size of an in-house tax team reduced last year due to people moving on, it is proving difficult to justify replacing them.

That said, the employment market seems to be reacting to the economic conditions as one would expect. We are now in full blown recession, which will possibly take another 7-12 months to run its course to completion, however the employment market will take a while longer to recover as hiring fresh people into a business won't happen until chief execs and business heads feel confident again about the business growth plans. This could be another 12 months beyond the end of the recession.

One positive is that although the Big Four firms have made some staff cuts (including tax professionals), these staff reductions have been relatively small compared to the total sizes of their tax departments. Then again, there may be more staff reductions during 2009, let's see how the market progresses.

Financial Meltdown? Yes, but what about tax jobs?

By Simon Godley

Since Sept 2007, I have blogged a few times on this subject (see Credit Crunch - Impact on Tax Jobs and State of the tax job market?...and let's be honest!). I have previously painted a rather bleak picture for the market outlook over the next few years, and now it is clear that that partly painted picture has become reality, with the 15th, 16th or 17th Sept 2008 now lodged firmly into the history books forever as the black Monday (or Tuesday or Wednesday) when the credit bubble finally burst and showed its real venom.

Also this afternoon, I have sat and listened to Gordon Brown deliver his labour party conference speech - facing up to today's dire state of financial markets, but at the same time telling us how strong the UK economy is, and how well labour have done to 'create' 3m new jobs since 1997.

I do have some respect for Gordon Brown - as he said in his speech today, he is a serious politician needing to deal with some serious problems, and I think he will probably try to do all he can to rescue the country from financial doom. But he lost quite a lot of my respect when he supposedly claimed a few years ago that the UK has moved on from a boom and bust economy. This was an amazingly silly statement from a UK chancellor, given that ever since Columbus discovered America in 1492 has there been several speculative bubbles (coupled with a large credit situation) and they have without exception always burst. And this is a phenomena that will never stop happening. It is clearly part of human nature to get excited and greedy about something (eg a new discovery or technological innovation) and as a result value a market at a price now that will not be actually be seen for many many years to come. When we realise this, its too late, and the bubble inevitably bursts. This time round, it seems to be property and commodities, coupled with a vast amount of balance sheet trickery by the investment banks. We clearly learnt nothing from Enron!

But what about jobs? Well here we will see a knock on boom / bust. Gordon Brown's 3m jobs that the Labour party has created will undoubtedly be followed by a dramatic rise in unemployment from 1m to possibly up to 3m in the UK, thereby cancelling out the good work.

And what about tax jobs? Well, at the moment this seems a little harder to work out. Partly because the Big 4 firms, the largest employers of tax people, have not yet properly shown their hands as to their position on staffing levels. I think over the last year they have lost people through natural attrition (which might be, say 5%, for example) and they are generally not replacing these people. They have not yet made any announcements on redundancies - some are saying that they are not recruiting, whilst others are saying they are still recruiting (when they are presented with a very good candidate).

So what will happen? My prediction is that the Big 4 will make redundancies, and it will affect the tax teams. This will be particularly acute in tax teams that thrive on M&A work (specifically acquisitions) or structured products. I think there will be a few rounds of redundancies, possibly the first one will be in Q1 of 2009, possibly earlier. I think waves of redundancies may continue into 2010. On the in-house side of the market, I think there will be many job losses amongst the middle and front office tax teams from the banks. Within broader commerce/industry, there will probably be a good level of corporate consolidation, and in-house tax roles may suffer where there is overlap of job functions. Aside from that, I don't think in-house tax teams will be reduced much, unless they are forced to reduce in numbers because of broader cuts that are taking place in head office functions.

So the next few years will be very difficult for a lot of tax professionals, in that the tax job market simply can't be immune from what will be a depressed employment market. But how long will it continue? I have now revised my forecast from my blog article in June this year and I think confidence to generally start recruiting again will be in 2011-2012.

Gosh, I feel like a major doomster. On the slightly brighter side, I think the tax job market may benefit in 2 ways. People who concentrate on tax compliance and reporting will continue to be in demand. Also, the government are bound to raise taxes, and they will possibly do it through more corporate or indirect taxes, so there will remain the desire to have tax consultants (in practice) and/or in-house tax people looking at ways to reduce those increasing tax burdens.

That's my prediction, most of which is gut feel rather than any concrete evidence, but only time will tell the full story.

UK Corporate Tax people - where are you?

By Simon Godley

Through my contact with clients and my awareness of current tax vacancies in the London market, particularly on the commerce/industry side, it seems that industry is really struggling to find and recruit UK tax accountants. I am referring to the classic scenario of a UK plc or multinational looking to hire a 'tax newly qual'. The hiring company initially envisages this as quite a straight forward exercise, thinking that there is probably quite a lot of them floating around, particularly after the ACA or CTA results are released. But it isn't, and more often than not it ends up being a disappointing, long and fruitless process, sometimes resulting in the company hiring someone from overseas with a non-UK tax background (NZ tax qualifieds are quite popular) or internally transferring someone from an accounting division and training them into a tax role.

So I thought this situation of the elusive UK Tax Accountant was worthy of further debate and investigation. I thought firstly I would initially try to guesstimate how many corporate tax (CT) newly qualifieds there are in London in 2008. I stress this is a rough estimate, but I think it gives a useful ball park figure.

I know that there was approx 120 tax graduates taken on by one of the Big Four in London in 2005. From this number, I have extrapolated to cover the London Top 10 firms (which will cover the vast majority of the large company CT market). I have then made some assumptions about what proportion of the tax graduates will stick with it through their 3 year training contract to qualifying. For example, there will be a percentage that will fail their ACA or CTA exams, and drop out of a tax career. There will also be a percentage who will simply decide it's not for them. I then assume, of those that qualify at ACA, a percentage will decide to take their qualification and use it in a different sector e.g. banking or management consulting, and therefore leave the tax market in 2008.

The number that I arrived at was 270. Let me clarify what this is - this is the estimate number of corporate tax newly qualifieds in London from the professional firms in 2008. Once again, I stress that this took some guess work, as it is not the sort of figure you can look up and find quickly on the Internet.

But wait - I think the majority (possibly 60% or so) of this 270 don't do any tax compliance or accounting work. The Big 4 firms in London have very much focused their CT divisions on planning/advisory, and a large number of CT qualifieds (even at newly qual level) no longer do tax compliance work. And it is the compliance and accounting experience that commerce/industry is looking for when it looks for a 'tax newly qual'. So this 270 could be easily reduced to c.100-120 CT newly qualifieds in London (that still do tax compliance work).

So this is now starting to explain why industry may struggle to hire UK Tax Accountants. Of a city with a 10 million population, there might be c.100 tax professionals who have the right skills to move across to industry as a Tax Accountant.

We then add to this the efforts on staff retention that the accounting firms use to keep their people e.g. overseas or internal secondments, regular annual promotions to the next level (which will lead to Tax Manager, and the challenging but 'gold at the end of the rainbow' type pursuit to Tax Partner), and we are left with a low number (say, 50 or less) of budding in-house UK Tax 'newly qual' Accountants.

And this is from a year (2005) in which the graduate intake into Big 4 would have been quite high. Just think how small the number might boil down to 3 years after a low graduate intake year!

Tax Jobs - Weekly Highlights

If, in amongst this downturn that we are experiencing (which I think still has a few shock waves yet to hit us) we see tax jobs being cut, I think people in the very specialists roles will potentially be the safest. When I say specialist roles, I am thinking of areas such as transfer pricing, in-house tax compliance and tax technology.

Transfer Pricing as an area has just boomed over the last 5-6 years, and many more people globally have specialised in it, and have chosen it as a successful career path. There always seems to be a global transfer pricing conference being organised at an exclusive international location, attended by the best brains in the transfer pricing world. I think also because of the onus on compliance and documentation within transfer pricing, there will be a need for it irrespective of how well business is doing.

Which brings me on to my featured job of the week, which is a specialist transfer pricing role with an economics bias within a non-Big Four niche consultancy in London:

Transfer Pricing Consultant - Niche Consultancy
London £40,000 - £70,000, depending on experience
See More Details

Accountancy firms put recruitment on hold.....but tax is safe??

Source: AccountancyAge.com





Research reveals about 57% of UK’s top accountancy firms are putting recruitment on hold.

About 57% of UK’s top accountancy firms are going to reduce staff numbers or keep them the same next year, according to the latest research by online recruitment group cvmail, part of media giant Thomson Reuters.

Although only 5% of firms said they actually planned to cut staff, the survey signalled the first significant pause in the dramatic growth of accountancy firms since the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

‘The effect of the credit crunch on top accountancy firms has been felt in a slowdown in corporate finance work and may feed through into consultancy work,’ Andy Eddleston, cvmail commercial manager, said.

‘However, their core audit and assurance and tax work should be largely unaffected. It is hoped that the vacuum created by the slowdown in areas like IPOs will be filled with rescue and recovery work.’

SG comment: Reading the results of this article are no surprise, but I don't agree that tax departments will be largely unaffected. Some of the biggest fees that are made by top accounting firms are from lucrative tax consultancy projects on M&A deals or tax structuring advice. In a downturn economy, this fee income will drop dramatically, and the result will be to cut staff in these departments. Tax compliance departments may be less affected.

For more analysis on this, read my article on Recession, Redundancy and Re-hiring

Recession, Redundancy and Re-hiring.......and tax recruitment

By Simon Godley

I read an interesting article on a recruiter newsletter this week, which gave some analysis as to how the stock market, the broader economy and the employment market interact, and the time lags between events in these markets. Basically, it suggested that if the stock market crashed, then quite often (not always) this would lead to an economic downturn 6-8 months later. Redundancies may quickly follow this, then as the recession (if it is a recession) runs it course, then it could take a further 2 years before businesses are confidently re-hiring again. This is on the basis that a recession has historically lasted, on average, about a year.

So, this means that from stock market crash to businesses re-hiring would be a minimum time frame of 2.5 to 3 years. The last stock market crash started in March 2000 when the dot com bubble burst - I remember this because I sold some highly inflated priced biotech shares to pay for my now wife's engagement ring in March 2000, which is the only time that I really profited from the stock market. Then there was the downturn (which wasn't called a recession) and then finally re-hiring started to take place at the end of 2003, so almost 4 years. So the last downturn and then recovery took longer than expected.

So what should we expect this time. No-one can really predict with much accuracy. My feeling is that this time we haven't seen a stock market crash, but a burst in the credit bubble. Let's say this started in September 2007. So according to the above theory, the broader economic downturn should be felt May 2008 onwards. This seems to be the case - property prices are falling quickly, inflation is rapidly increasing, and some businesses have stopped hiring. There have been some redundancies in pockets of the labour market, but not (yet) in the tax market. This will undoubtedly happen, and let's see what the Big Four do over the next 6 months. Thus the prediction from now (June 2008), following the above theory, is that a recession will run its course over the next c.1 year, but the re-hiring won't start until March 2010, and this is being optimistic. It could be into 2011 when firms feel they are understaffed again.

2009 could be an interesting year for recruiters! Watch this space.