KPMG reviews

You will only be promoted or recognized if you are part of management's "favorites club" irrespective of the quality of your work or if you actually do any useful work at all. Management has a 'blame the victim' philosophy when it comes to performance, career advancement, or any other question. No matter what issues you attempt to discuss, they will always attempt to spin it as something you are failing to do but on the other hand can never explain what that something actually is. For someone who is naturally introspective and engages in self evaluation this just feels like a cop-out on managements part. If you are proactive about seeking advice or assistance on some issue and you are not part of the special club management will use that against you in performance ratings. Performance and promotion standards are opaque. upper management is completely incapable of articulating how they judge your performance or fitness for a particular role. Outdated technology. Your skills will wither if you don't keep up with stuff outside of work. Training is a mixed-bag. You may be able to get some training but whether you can use it is another story. There is no enthusiasm for the products either within the business unit or the development team. KPMG as a whole is a company that doesn't seem to understand itself. Upper management wants to treat every employee like a replaceable cog in the big reverse-hotelling machine. There are a multitude of different 'companies' within the larger firm and those differences should be encouraged - not stamped out.

It's the smallest of the Big 4 and KPMG makes concessions regarding price (unlike PWC who does not give discounted rates). So, engagement teams eat their hours all the time to not go over budget but they run the risk of getting laid off due to low utilization. They accept clients that require lots of manual hours of data entry so they push the data entry to the staff rather than sending that work to the India Q center where it belongs so the crop of people moving up don't know anything about tax. PWC has internal proprietary software that cuts the data entry to a fraction of the time KPMG would spend giving it the staff to do, which frees up the PWC staff to actually learn more important concepts. The quality of training is a joke. No one in senior management and above really cares about your career, so watch your back. Being on the client side now and seeing PWC work my employer's account, I can see the difference in training and quality. I would not recommend choosing KPMG over the other Big 4 firms.