Originally Posted by Unregistered

Hi all, recently made a move from B4 (second year senior) to a compliance role and just wanted to share some of my thoughts.

First of all, accounting as a profession is so underpaid (excluding CFOs and Finance director levels). Went for multiple interviews requesting for an expected salary of 6k and I was genuinely surprised by the number of accounting roles not being able to meet this salary. Really made me wonder how the govt dares to talk about making accounting an attractive profession again when the remuneration for these roles are like that. At the end of the day, a starting level compliance role was able to meet this salary expectation like ???

Secondly, I would like to call out the workplace culture of not just the B4, but most accounting related departments. It sincerely feels like exploitation of the naive fresh graduates who are likely at their first full time job, making them handle excessive workloads and OT. This culture is then brought to the finance departments in commercial firms by those who leave B4 (based on my personal observation of audit clients). Personally, this is worse than being slightly underpaid. We have audit managers essentially gaslighting staff and seniors into retracting resignations just using the idea of “faster-growing salaries”. Then again, this method works well on us fresh grads in our first full-time role. By the time I was firm on moving out of audit, I was already quite burnt out and not even looking forward to a new role.

In my experience, it was a little disappointing that I had to move on to a role that is less accounting-related, given I spent 3 years in audit just to obtain a professional accounting cert. (Has anyone seen the SCAQ ad on Instagram that promotes their cert by saying “Do the best for your children, Build Their Future”? Like wtf🤡???) However, if I get a chance in the future, I’m open to the idea of going back to accounting roles if the payscale can match up to other roles and no more of that toxic workplace environment.

Thanks for reading to the end and feel free to share your experiences as well. Really enjoy reading this forum apart from the quarreling parts.

Jiayous,
an ex-auditor😬