KPMG:GLOBAL ACCOUNTANCY and consulting group KPMG has announced that approximately 200 of its Irish workforce will lose their jobs.
The firm, which employs almost 2,000 people in Dublin, Cork, Galway and Belfast, made the announcement at a meeting with staff in the Mansion House in Dublin yesterday morning.
The company told staff it was making the redundancies to ensure that the firm’s cost base and resources were balanced between current needs and anticipated future demand.
In a statement, KPMG said: “The redundancies will, in the main, impact on recently qualified accountants and on support services staff.”
It will also impact, but to a significantly lesser extent, on professional staff in the firm’s transaction-based businesses, the statement said.
The company also said it would be cutting pay to the remaining staff by between 5 per cent and 10 per cent.
There were few smiles on the faces of staff leaving the accountancy firm’s headquarters in Dublin city centre yesterday evening and even fewer people who were willing to talk to the media.
They all would have noticed the Rolls Royce with personalised UK number plates parked directly outside the front door of their offices as they left for home.
Many looked grimly at such an ostentatious display of wealth on a day when it was announced that employees earning less than €35,000 a year would have their pay cut by 5 per cent, while those earning more than €35,000 will have to take a 10 per cent cut.
“The mood is one of surprise, although I have to say there was a feeling something was going to happen this week,” one staff member in her 30s told The Irish Times.
Another employee, a trainee accountant in her first year with the company, said that people were “understandably gloomy” after the announcement was made.
She said that she had been unable to attend the Mansion House meeting as all the places had been taken by more senior staff members. “People are certainly upset to be getting a pay cut but it could be worse, I suppose. We could be heading for the dole queue,” she said.
KPMG said the redundancy programme would not impact on the 250 graduates joining the firm this autumn nor on the firm’s plans to recruit at graduate level in 2010, adding “the firm’s graduate trainee programme is and will remain critical to the firm’s future success”.
It is not just KPMG staff who will be affected by the announcement. Séamus Fitzgerald took over a cafe adjacent to the company’s head office last June and was dismayed by yesterday’s news.
“This really is the last thing I need,” he said. “Business has slowed down in the last few months and the staff there really are my bread and butter.”
Dublin-based investment and hedge fund company Custom House Administration and Corporate Services also announced a pay cut for its staff.
Some 140 staff at the firm were told they will have their pay cut by 10 per cent.
A spokesman for the company said there was a mixed reaction from staff following the news, with many relieved that no redundancies had been announced.
“Given the current environment, profit and turnover are both down, so we had to make the pay cut in the hope we won’t have to make redundancies,” the spokesman said.
A spokeswoman for Deloitte yesterday said the accountancy firm was “in the process of conducting a review of the business and as of yet no decision has been made as a result of this”.
A spokesman for Ernst Young, another of the big four accountancy firms, said the company regularly reviews business costs and staffing structures and has “no plans to announce pay cuts or any significant redundancies”.