By Park Hyong-ki
Being an accountant at professional services firms was once considered a dream job especially for those who studied business management.
Those with the Certified Public Accountant license were paid top dollars with assurance of job security to practice bookkeeping and auditing. If they perform well, they were given the opportunity to become a partner.
But this no longer seems to be the case as the number of chartered accountants at Korea’s four largest professional services firms has been declining over the years. The four are: Samil PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Samjung KPMG, Deloitte Anjin and Ernst & Young Han Young.
More than 250 accountants left their jobs at the big four firms from 2014-2016, according to the Korean Institute of Certified Public Accountants.
There were a total of 19,081 accountants at professional services firms, and private and public companies last year. Professional services firms, including the big four, had 10,100 accountants last year.
Samil PwC saw the largest number of its junior accountants with less than 10 years’ experience quitting and moving to other companies as their internal accountants. It lost more than 100 accountants over the past three years.
With the decline, chartered accountants at the four largest firms took up about 26 percent of the total in 2016, down from 30 percent in 2014.
The number of junior accountants fell from 4,093 in 2014 to 3,997 in 2015, according to the Financial Supervisory Service.
The reason behind this downward trend varies. Some observers say more and more accountants especially the young are leaving to seek less rigorous working hours even for less paycheck as they seek work-life balance. Others noted lack of welfare and slow wage growth, despite long working hours.
The negative image of professional services firms and their accountants also spurred the exodus amid a series of corporate accounting frauds.
Deloitte Anjin has been implicated in cooking the books of Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering when the firm was the shipbuilder’s auditor from 2013-2014. The Financial Services Commission (FSC) fined Samil PwC more than 1 billion won over accounting fraud of Daewoo Engineering & Construction two years ago. Samjung KPMG failed to properly audit STX Offshore & Shipbuilding, while Ernst & Young Han Young did the same on debt-laden Hanjin Shipping.
“It has been pointed out numerous times that accountants here are not able to independently audit their corporate clients’ books under the top-down relationship,” said an industry source.
The FSC is looking to strengthen rules on auditing by increasing penalties, including extending prison term from 5 years to less than 10 years to those who committed accounting irregularities.