E&Y: $60k + $5k bonus

An undergrad is looking at $3k to $5k less on the starting salary? The majority of hires are undergrad so it is surprising that the salary focus of this article is grad students. Grad students, typically those with non finance undergrad degrees, usually have less finance/accounting under their belts than undergrad accounting students. While they do get higher pay ($3k-$5k) to compensate them for the add’l years of schooling/experience, they are often not worth the bump in salary. An undergrad student (with maturity) can easily do as well, job performance wise, as a grad student.

FOR THOSE NEW STAFFERS AND SENIOR ASSOCIATES, hang in there. Don’t focus on this short term pay-back of starting salaries. The experience gained from those first two to five years with the BIG 4 are significantly more valuable than the pay you receive.

Also, a retention bonus was recently passed to incent longer stays. Bonus pays about 15k over 2-3 years if you stay from start until manager. This bonus is payable once promoted to manager.

Associate – [ INR 500,000-600,000] US$10K-12K
Senior : – [800,000-950,000] (starting) US$16K-19,000]
Manager – [INR 1,500,000-1,650,000] starting [US$30K]

Senior Mgr [INR 2million-2.2 million] starting
Director [ INR 3.5 million- 4.5 million] starting [US$70K]
Partner [ INR 8 to 10 million] -US$200K

Enjoy where will you get such a handy ready recknor. Needless to say all these emerging market guys having costs of living which is comporable to their counterparts in the west as cars, cellphones, fuel, TV cost the same or a lot more in emerging markets than in the US due to high VAT and custom duties and these guys have to work much longer hours getting paid so much lesser. cheers

I think you actually make his point. The reason being is that the work done by 1st year staff should not actually just be stuff that can be done by a highschooler. What ends up happening is that in the complex corporate world of business and ever changing complexity of transactions, you essentially only have 2 lines of defense (the Manager and the Partner) instead of 4 (the associates, seniors, managers and Partners). Given that the individuals with the most exposure to the day to day audit are the seniors and staff (who are performing the grunt work and interviewing the personnel), losing this line of defense can be costly to the overall quality of the audit.

As someone who had some industry experience myself before going into audit, I can say that the way I approached things was very different than my peers. Having implemented a accounting information system prior to auditing, my view of a company’s control over their information system integration after an acquisition was much different than if I had never seen one actually done.

The previous experience allows you to see the big picture much faster as well as appreciate some of the difficulties that real companies face. While I think it’s unrealistic to require previous experience (given much of what is currently expected of initial staff and seniors as well as their pay), if the goal is overall audit quality, then it could only help.

I agree that there are plenty of things wrong with the current public accounting model, but placing an emphasis on hiring from industry instead of from college would not solve them.

Auditors should not so underpaid.

Auditors should also not be primarily inexperienced qualified with only a recent university degree. but should be those with decades of experience who fully understand and have experienced the industries they are reviewing financially. The big 4 should recruit from industry, not from the university.

The current system is in tremendous need of reform.

Also, I have a phenomenal line of site of how starting salaries are determined by the BIG 4 firms in the US and currently its not a collusion game, actually most of them get their data from Tower Perrin and though i believe most of them would like to start the kids out at 50K its competition triggered by one firm which is a bit out of line forcing the others to play catch up.