Talentpool - Poll on why people resign

Talentpool is currently collecting data on why tax people resign from their job and move on from their employer, trying to get some real-time data as to what motivates people to leave a company or a job role.

To participate and contribute in this, please click through to the Poll set up on LinkedIn.

Thanks in advance.
Simon Godley

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.

Tax Market - Reflecting on 2008

By Simon Godley

Firstly, I would like to wish all readers of this tax blog and all professionals within the in-house tax market a very good Christmas and happy and peaceful New Year.

This has been the year in which the credit crunch problem has finally crystallised and has hit all the markets very hard - the stock market, the general economy and more recently the employment market.

My first blog posting about how the credit crunch might affect in-house tax jobs was in September 2007, prompted by the major banks going on recruitment freezes. At that time, the market didn't feel too good, but we could not predict the financial tsunami that hit us 3 months ago. These hiring freezes didn't stay on during the first half of 2008, but since October / November, it's not just the banks which are on hiring freezes, but the majority of the UK commerce/industry market.

This is going to take a long while to untangle, but I intend to update this blog on the state of the tax job market during 2009, and hopefully this time next year things won't look quite so bleak.

Simon Godley

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

This week I refer to the interim tax market, which I feel will most likely remain strong during a downturn, that's if there becomes pressure on in-house tax departments not to recruit permanent members. Things would have to get very tough for this to follow. The job below is very suitable for an ex-Head of Tax, who may have moved onto the contracting market after a number of years in a senior permanent capacity in-house.

Senior Tax Adviser - Interim
Surrey £600 - £800 per day
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

Tax Jobs - Weekly Highlights

This week I am revisiting and featuring the area of tax automation and/or tax compliance technology. Clearly a specialist area within tax, but one that seems to have filtered into multinationals that take tax reporting seriously. Consulting firms have developed teams within their tax offering that will purely advise multinational groups on how to improve and streamline their tax reporting and compliance processes, but are not looking to sell a specific tax software product.

Below is an example of this, being an excellent and forward thinking opportunity for someone with either a detailed tax compliance/reporting background from industry, or someone who knows their way around SAP/Oracle financial reporting systems:

Tax Manager - Tax Compliance Systems
London £55,000 - £90,000, depending on experience
See More Details

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.

Tax Jobs - Weekly Highlights

This week's job highlight is a senior end tax planning role that I am working on for a large US multinational, based in London. This type of role is fairly uncommon, given that it is working almost exclusively on tax planning across the EMEA & Asia region and tax-led corporate transactions work. The role is part of a flat structure tax team, that basically deals with all tax planning for the group outside the US. The group tax function has a separate team dedicated to the tax compliance and reporting. This role also carries a very competitive salary package, including a final salary pension scheme, which is now very rare to see for new appointments.

Senior Tax Planning Manager, London
c.£85,000 + Car + Bonus + Final Salary Pension
Click here for more details

Tax Lawyer McKenna returns to practice from in-house

Source: Taxation 2 magazine

Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP) has recruited leading tax lawyer Michael McKenna as a Partner in its strategic drive to enhance its tax capabilities.

Michael was a tax counsel at Goldman Sachs International, where he advised its divisions on the tax implications of all aspects of their businesses and transactions outside the US. Before that he spent seven years within the tax team at Clifford Chance, where he advised on a broad range of corporate tax issues with a particular focus on real estate clients as well as finance and securitisation transactions.

SG comment: I do not know Michael McKenna, but from this news flow, this seems a good example of a highly astute tax lawyer who is managing his tax career extremely well - 7 years with Clifford Chance (incredibly good name), at which point he is perfectly well placed to move in-house as a tax counsel. Following a period of time with Goldman Sachs (incredibly good name), not sure how long, he makes a return to practice as a Tax Partner. I am guessing (and I have no evidence to show this) that he has made it to Partner level with a leading law firm quicker that if he had stayed with Clifford Chance, because of the very valuable and CV enhancing role with Goldmans. As with a lot of things, timing (and high quality experience) could be everything for a great tax career.