Accounting firm ‘Big Four’ is firing employees because they are taking multiple online training courses at the same time

According to a report, EY has fired dozens of US employees for taking multiple online training courses at the same time.

The accounting firm of the “Big Four” alleged that the employees cheated, while staff said the incident was merely a consequence of the task-heavy work culture encouraged by the company.

The company laid off employees last week after an investigation found that some staffers took more than one online training class at a time during “EY Ignite Learning Week” in May, according to the Financial Times.

An EY insider told The Post on Tuesday that none of the laid-off employees were offered benefits or severance after the sudden layoffs.

“This was kept completely secret,” the source said.

EY did not return a request for comment.

Several laid-off employees said they did not believe they were violating company policy by taking multiple training courses at the same time.

The training courses – with topics such as ‘How strong is your digital brand on the market?’ and “Conversing with AI, one prompt at a time” – counting towards the 40 continuing education credits that EY employees must complete in a year.

But EY said taking more than one training at a time was against the company’s ethics policy.

“At EY, our core values ​​of integrity and ethics are at the forefront of everything we do,” the company told The Post in a statement. “EY US has terminated individuals who, after thorough investigations, violated our Global Code of Conduct and U.S. Learning Policy.”

Employees first heard of the incoming cancellations on Friday morning, when they received meeting invitations.

“At EY you know that if you get an invitation to a meeting, this is a termination,” the insider said.

Despite the company’s history, employees said EY’s response was extreme and unfair. They claimed they had no idea that viewing multiple workouts at once was against company policy.

“Their emails promoting EY Ignite even encouraged us to attend as many sessions as our schedule allowed,” one employee who was fired on Friday told the Financial Times. “We all work with three monitors. I was hoping to hear new ideas that I could bring to the table to differentiate myself from others.”

A second employee who was fired said the company itself is “cultivating a culture of multitasking.”

“If you’re forced to bill 45 hours a week and do many more hours of internal work, how can you not?” the person said.

A third employee pointed out the hypocrisy of punishing employees for multitasking.

“I know a partner who has two (customer) calls and turns the camera on and off depending on who he is talking to,” the employee said. “If this is unethical, then it is unethical.”

The insider who spoke to The Post said that when employees were surveyed during EY’s investigation, they said they attended multiple sessions at once out of genuine interest — and not out of a desire for more CPE credit.

“It’s not necessarily like you’re going through a tax bracket and it’s making your head hurt,” the source said. “Some of these are really interesting.”

According to the source, many of the courses overlapped by only half an hour. One course sometimes lasted from 9:00 am to 10:30 am, while another training lasted from 10:00 am to 11:00 am. Employees therefore only kept two windows open at the same time for half an hour, the insider said.

“There was no cheating. Because you are in two meetings, are you multitasking?” said the source. “You can’t meet the demands of your job without multitasking. 70 hours per week. It’s pretty blatant.”

EY is likely sensitive to the demonstrable breach of ethical standards since it was scandalously spotlighted a few years ago.

In 2022, the company admitted that hundreds of its employees had cheated on their certified public accountant exams — and that the company had withheld key evidence of the tampering from regulators.

The accounting firm was ordered to pay a whopping $100 million fine – the largest fine ever imposed on an accounting firm, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Some employees used Fishbowl, an anonymous messaging service that allowed employees to rate and rave about their companies.

Employees questioned whether EY bore any responsibility for the multitasking scandal, as the system allowed multiple training sessions to be opened simultaneously on Zoom and counted overlapping course credits.

Another Fishbowl user called EY’s response “simply bizarre.”

“Maybe lower their rating, deduct the bonus or even postpone the promotion, but simply ending it immediately is just cruel,” the user wrote. “If this was so important, implement better systems.”

The company has since changed its language for future EY Ignite training weeks.

“You may not engage in any other learning activities while completing this activity,” EY wrote in an email to staffers ahead of a training event in August.