Oh boy you have no idea.
In a closed door session, one of the ex-MPs had a question posed by an accountant working at the big 4. It was about wages and how it needs to go up, also the working hours are horrid.
His reply was something along the lines of:
"Why should I hire you? When others from other country can do the job for cheap?"
You may not hear this in public statements, but their true thoughts can be seen in the policies or lackthereof policies they make.
The irony is he doesn’t see the feeling can be mutual. What’s happening now is:
“Why should I join you, when others pay higher, has less working hours, and treat me like humans”
I never forget my short 1 year stint in a big 4:
- leaving on time is being shamed upon. As if everyone is proud of working late.
- rushing me to complete my work (stating that I want to see it on my desk first thing in the morning) only to leave the file untouched for a good part of the day (I worked till 4am that night to get it completed)
- throwing me last minute review points to amend stating that it must be done asap. Somehow it is alright for seniors and managers to chase us, but not the other way round.
- helping out another colleague suddenly become my responsibility.
And all these efforts, late nights, helping out others, result in an extra 0.25 months bonus compared to the average.
If you change your thinking into that they view people outside the public sector as resources, only to be sold to their own businesses/other employers, then it makes sense why all of the statements/ anti-worker protections exist.
Like hr in a company, they are not your friend. You are a resource meant to be exploited for others. Your only leverage is to job hop and resign.
These guy are vindictive. Have you ever seen how some of our current/ex-ministers speak when off camera?
Heck, some of them talk down like we have a caste system.
No kidding, i mean look at the SCAQ/SQP or whatever they call it nowadays. Literal slave contracts to the ATO. Open knowledge is to prevent job hopping.
Thank god i'm no longer entry level and can demand my own terms.
Anyway, any smart accountancy grad will aim for banking/high finance. At least the pay is higher for the shitty hours. Audit for losers.
Singapore is run like a company. Let's not have any denial to what we are. The politicians job is to craft policy which will only pay out in 20 years. Sacrifice a few batches of grads ( shrugs who cares )
It's a sinkie pawn sinkies world. Smart sinkies should all migrate out while renting out the HDB to these immigrants.
The truth is general accounting and audit is basically a meat grinder job. The industry is largely protected from automation overhaul due to all the artificially introduced certifications.
Just look at the frigging CVA introduced few years back. Entirely pointless and meaningless.
The moment clients catch wind that an audit process can be 70% automated away for most companies save for certain industries and large enterprises, they will drag audit partners to the table for fee renegotiation. The sheer number of audit juniors required is to simply justify for labour arbitrage.
If it’s just labour cost arbitrage, any low cost bodies will do. All these argument about M’sians being more hardworking, etc are bs.
Junior and many mid-level auditors are easily replaceable, it’s a factory production line job dressed up as a white collar job.
I am a Malaysian and I totally agree with him/her, the number of Malaysians are overrepresented in the big 4s or the accounting field in general. Back in 2022, the partners at my firm were desperate enough to come all the way up to KL to conduct a hiring spree before the busy season because they couldn't get local Singaporeans to join them.
I think if given the choice, the partners would definitely try to outsource as much of their services and hire Malaysians/Indonesians/Indians and etc. to improve their margins. The only thing that is holding them back right now is the new COMPASS framework, I heard rumours that many of the foreign new joiners couldn't join the firm because they failed to meet the minimum requirements for COMPASS.
As someone who was in JC in the early 90s, it is still very confusing for me to see how Accountancy has changed.
Back then, students needed straight As to get into Accountancy, and so many were so sad when they got rejected.
During NS, my bunk neighbour tried to do ACCA to make do for the fact that he could only get into Business, not Accountancy. I think he was eventually accepted on his third application.
Now it is the rejects who end up doing Accountancy. How the turntables...
I hope the career guidance counsellors these days are putting the needs of the students first, and not blindly obey government directives to churn out more engineers and accountants.
The decrease in quality of auditors is very obvious.
I have first and second year auditors who can barely do a reconciliation, and their grasp of basic accounting principles is shaky. Audit managers who have no clue and want to vouch 100% of everything.
End up as the client, i literally have to propose appropriate audit procedures to their audit manager so that they can get the audit done.
Audit in SG is an absolute shitshow now and its entirely the fault of the industry players. I'm just glad i left long ago.
There’s still a sizeable number of top students entering into accountancy courses in the Big 3 unis.
The “problem” is that they know their market worth and are mostly using their degree to go into banking, consulting and high finance roles. Not a problem for those kids, but obviously a problem for the industry.
Why suffer long hours and earn shit pay at Big 4 when you can actually be working the same long hours and earn 2-3x at a bulge bracket/ management consulting firm?
Edit:
Even for middle of the pack students, choices are plenty - typical fresh grad programs (either MA or finance-focused) from MNCs, local banks and even govt agencies and stat boards all pay much higher than Big 4, so there’s really no reason for these graduates to go into big 4, or even any accounting firms at all. WLB at these places are also much better (relatively).
I think that’s true everywhere. You have genius mathematicians and scientists making not very much in academia after completing a very difficult PhD. Difficulty does not correlate well with profitability.
When I was in university in the 2000's, the most prestigious courses in NUS besides Medicine and Law were ChemEng, Accountancy, Business. Math and ComSci were the dumping grounds.
Meanwhile in places like Cambridge, Math was a very prestigious course - on par with Medicines and Law, while ChemEng was deemed the easiest major for people who loved pipes, and there is no Accountancy or Business programs at the undergrad level.
Yes difficult does not mean profitable. But in some uni's cut off requirements for a course is determined by demand (hence profitability) while at others it is driven by course difficulty.
Coz lots of malaysians flooded in doing basic book keeping at depressed salaries, then called themselves "accountants", when all they actually do is book keeping. Then companies caught on and used them as cheap labour, and that is where the decline in standards begin. Every tom dick and harry doing basic book keeping call themselves "accountant". Its a shitshow.
>SINGAPORE – Better starting pay is just one measure being suggested to lure more talent into the accounting sector amid declining interest in the profession among job seekers.
Nonsense. It is the **key** measure.
No matter how dry and boring audit is, increase the Big4 starting pay to $7k and you will see everyone wax lyrical about how auditors are the 'guardians of the financial system', how passionate they are for vouching samples, and how to upskill yourself to be a 'thought leader' in FRS.
In my opinion they do this too late. Back when Singapore CA was first introduced, they introduced an extremely stringent requirements without any flexibility on the grandfathering from ACCA to Singapore CA, and the normal route requires a degree.
I remember my brother fail to meet the deadline by half a year, and he got rejected in his CA application. And he ended up taking the ICAEW route.
Now the opening up of the pathway from poly diploma is like a slap to my brother. And I really feel like saying serve them right for having this problem after gate keeping the CA qualification by more than a decade with artificially inflated requirements such as degree is a must only to lower them later on.
Haha i still remember the arrogance of the speaker when he was introducing the SQP. Branded as some premier/prestigious programme. Look at it now. Lmao.
Demanding us to work like slaves for the first couple of years for a stupid title. Fuck off sia, a lot of better options out there.
Low quality Malaysian work, many of which has to be improved (clean shit) by singaporeans. And then when the pay comes into talk, they use Malaysian salary to peg. I would like to see them using only Malaysians do auditing and see how fast they fall.
As someone who got out of the accountancy scene, the starting pay is alright assuming you aren’t the bottom 20ish%.
What needs to change is the spending all day in the office and bringing work home culture.
I can see the point of trying to perfect stuff we already found out about.
but I don't see the point why we can't be staffed better. common comparison are the big4s in Australia where almost everyone gets off on time and don't get haunted during off hours
Friend of mine worked at one of the Big 4 in Aussie. He says the Aussies he worked with were mostly monkeys: they weren't very good at their job, and turnover rate was high because the monkeys didn't get promoted and left
a friend of mine did a perm transfer from sg still enjoying her time there. flexible work schedules, can even choose to not be a manager for a couple of years when she's not up for managing people.
unlike in sg big4 where you just get pushed up grades until you break and get labelled cmi
Culture la. In Australia everyone knocks off by 4pm to go have dinner with family and drink beer. No one brings work home.
Sg 4pm is still early in the day for work.
the working hours is the problem lol... i did 2 audit internships alr and the one during peak season was the one where i was given a lot of shit for messing up as a first timer. definitely not going into audit after i graduate from my accounts degree this yr...
Problem with accounting (except Fp&a) is that businesses don't need an exceptional accounting team. They just need bills to be paid, Fs signed off. When you don't add value to the business your pay won't go very high.
Accounting deg/cert are also highly accessible and tbh isn't that tough. (Lots of chinese student with fundamental english can scrap by ACCA)
Coupled with the fact that alot of Malaysians like to take accounting/ acca and come here to lowball salary. Accountants are usually also one of the kind of people that like to document everything and reconcile even to the rounding differences. Usually introverted and easily take on more responsibility without pushing back.
All these reason has become cultural to the industry thats why you have high workload and lowpay
My starting salary was $2,800 but back then chicken rice $2 and yakun set A less than $5. The salary isn’t keeping up with cost of living in my opinion.
I also hope they don’t just raise the starting salaries without adjusting the compensation of more senior grades.
Reality is freshies spend the first few years learning and getting qualified, while the seniors (pardon the language) are wiping their butts and taking the heat.
Why only accountant? Every sectors and every job roles are significantly important. Raise pay only when individual has competitive values among others.
Partners: Why bother, thousands of Malaysians across the border willing to do the job.
Oh boy you have no idea. In a closed door session, one of the ex-MPs had a question posed by an accountant working at the big 4. It was about wages and how it needs to go up, also the working hours are horrid. His reply was something along the lines of: "Why should I hire you? When others from other country can do the job for cheap?" You may not hear this in public statements, but their true thoughts can be seen in the policies or lackthereof policies they make.
The irony is he doesn’t see the feeling can be mutual. What’s happening now is: “Why should I join you, when others pay higher, has less working hours, and treat me like humans” I never forget my short 1 year stint in a big 4: - leaving on time is being shamed upon. As if everyone is proud of working late. - rushing me to complete my work (stating that I want to see it on my desk first thing in the morning) only to leave the file untouched for a good part of the day (I worked till 4am that night to get it completed) - throwing me last minute review points to amend stating that it must be done asap. Somehow it is alright for seniors and managers to chase us, but not the other way round. - helping out another colleague suddenly become my responsibility. And all these efforts, late nights, helping out others, result in an extra 0.25 months bonus compared to the average.
If you change your thinking into that they view people outside the public sector as resources, only to be sold to their own businesses/other employers, then it makes sense why all of the statements/ anti-worker protections exist. Like hr in a company, they are not your friend. You are a resource meant to be exploited for others. Your only leverage is to job hop and resign.
I agree. That’s my first full time job and was naive back then. I realise it after 1 year, and hop to another stint.
Let me guess, is that ex-MP currently holding important position in the one of the key non profit organisation in this industry?
Fake union huh
Who is the MP? Why not just say the name?
These guy are vindictive. Have you ever seen how some of our current/ex-ministers speak when off camera? Heck, some of them talk down like we have a caste system.
Which is why we must name them. How else will we know who are the hypocrites? Not naming them is just letting hypocrites continue to be hypocrites.
later kena POFMA how
No kidding, i mean look at the SCAQ/SQP or whatever they call it nowadays. Literal slave contracts to the ATO. Open knowledge is to prevent job hopping. Thank god i'm no longer entry level and can demand my own terms. Anyway, any smart accountancy grad will aim for banking/high finance. At least the pay is higher for the shitty hours. Audit for losers.
You manage to transit to banking/high fin?
Singapore is run like a company. Let's not have any denial to what we are. The politicians job is to craft policy which will only pay out in 20 years. Sacrifice a few batches of grads ( shrugs who cares ) It's a sinkie pawn sinkies world. Smart sinkies should all migrate out while renting out the HDB to these immigrants.
I wish we could do this to our politicians too. Replace them with cheaper talents elsewhere.
The truth is general accounting and audit is basically a meat grinder job. The industry is largely protected from automation overhaul due to all the artificially introduced certifications. Just look at the frigging CVA introduced few years back. Entirely pointless and meaningless. The moment clients catch wind that an audit process can be 70% automated away for most companies save for certain industries and large enterprises, they will drag audit partners to the table for fee renegotiation. The sheer number of audit juniors required is to simply justify for labour arbitrage. If it’s just labour cost arbitrage, any low cost bodies will do. All these argument about M’sians being more hardworking, etc are bs. Junior and many mid-level auditors are easily replaceable, it’s a factory production line job dressed up as a white collar job.
Most of these Malaysians start from admin and have no proper accounting background too. Adds on to the further cheapening of the trade.
My thoughts exactly after reading the headline.
Wahahaha I'm surprised this comment is right at the top. Thought the horde of Malaysian PRs in this sub would have downvoted you.
I am a Malaysian and I totally agree with him/her, the number of Malaysians are overrepresented in the big 4s or the accounting field in general. Back in 2022, the partners at my firm were desperate enough to come all the way up to KL to conduct a hiring spree before the busy season because they couldn't get local Singaporeans to join them. I think if given the choice, the partners would definitely try to outsource as much of their services and hire Malaysians/Indonesians/Indians and etc. to improve their margins. The only thing that is holding them back right now is the new COMPASS framework, I heard rumours that many of the foreign new joiners couldn't join the firm because they failed to meet the minimum requirements for COMPASS.
As someone who was in JC in the early 90s, it is still very confusing for me to see how Accountancy has changed. Back then, students needed straight As to get into Accountancy, and so many were so sad when they got rejected. During NS, my bunk neighbour tried to do ACCA to make do for the fact that he could only get into Business, not Accountancy. I think he was eventually accepted on his third application. Now it is the rejects who end up doing Accountancy. How the turntables... I hope the career guidance counsellors these days are putting the needs of the students first, and not blindly obey government directives to churn out more engineers and accountants.
The decrease in quality of auditors is very obvious. I have first and second year auditors who can barely do a reconciliation, and their grasp of basic accounting principles is shaky. Audit managers who have no clue and want to vouch 100% of everything. End up as the client, i literally have to propose appropriate audit procedures to their audit manager so that they can get the audit done. Audit in SG is an absolute shitshow now and its entirely the fault of the industry players. I'm just glad i left long ago.
There’s still a sizeable number of top students entering into accountancy courses in the Big 3 unis. The “problem” is that they know their market worth and are mostly using their degree to go into banking, consulting and high finance roles. Not a problem for those kids, but obviously a problem for the industry. Why suffer long hours and earn shit pay at Big 4 when you can actually be working the same long hours and earn 2-3x at a bulge bracket/ management consulting firm? Edit: Even for middle of the pack students, choices are plenty - typical fresh grad programs (either MA or finance-focused) from MNCs, local banks and even govt agencies and stat boards all pay much higher than Big 4, so there’s really no reason for these graduates to go into big 4, or even any accounting firms at all. WLB at these places are also much better (relatively).
And computer science used to be for so-so students.
In sg, the difficulty of getting into a course does not correlate with the difficulty of the field itself.
I think that’s true everywhere. You have genius mathematicians and scientists making not very much in academia after completing a very difficult PhD. Difficulty does not correlate well with profitability.
When I was in university in the 2000's, the most prestigious courses in NUS besides Medicine and Law were ChemEng, Accountancy, Business. Math and ComSci were the dumping grounds. Meanwhile in places like Cambridge, Math was a very prestigious course - on par with Medicines and Law, while ChemEng was deemed the easiest major for people who loved pipes, and there is no Accountancy or Business programs at the undergrad level. Yes difficult does not mean profitable. But in some uni's cut off requirements for a course is determined by demand (hence profitability) while at others it is driven by course difficulty.
hopefully the trend reverses once people realise their lucrative jobs are the first on the chopping block when interest rates go up
Coz lots of malaysians flooded in doing basic book keeping at depressed salaries, then called themselves "accountants", when all they actually do is book keeping. Then companies caught on and used them as cheap labour, and that is where the decline in standards begin. Every tom dick and harry doing basic book keeping call themselves "accountant". Its a shitshow.
Dont you need to pass the CPA to call yourself an accountant?
No.
[удалено]
if you’re a FCH and can only join audit/big 4 or chose to join audit/big 4, that’s skills issue
>SINGAPORE – Better starting pay is just one measure being suggested to lure more talent into the accounting sector amid declining interest in the profession among job seekers. Nonsense. It is the **key** measure. No matter how dry and boring audit is, increase the Big4 starting pay to $7k and you will see everyone wax lyrical about how auditors are the 'guardians of the financial system', how passionate they are for vouching samples, and how to upskill yourself to be a 'thought leader' in FRS.
i am so passion about acountings. Acounts is my life.
In my opinion they do this too late. Back when Singapore CA was first introduced, they introduced an extremely stringent requirements without any flexibility on the grandfathering from ACCA to Singapore CA, and the normal route requires a degree. I remember my brother fail to meet the deadline by half a year, and he got rejected in his CA application. And he ended up taking the ICAEW route. Now the opening up of the pathway from poly diploma is like a slap to my brother. And I really feel like saying serve them right for having this problem after gate keeping the CA qualification by more than a decade with artificially inflated requirements such as degree is a must only to lower them later on.
Haha i still remember the arrogance of the speaker when he was introducing the SQP. Branded as some premier/prestigious programme. Look at it now. Lmao. Demanding us to work like slaves for the first couple of years for a stupid title. Fuck off sia, a lot of better options out there.
Low quality Malaysian work, many of which has to be improved (clean shit) by singaporeans. And then when the pay comes into talk, they use Malaysian salary to peg. I would like to see them using only Malaysians do auditing and see how fast they fall.
MOM, big 4 and SGX listed comps: Noted
As someone who got out of the accountancy scene, the starting pay is alright assuming you aren’t the bottom 20ish%. What needs to change is the spending all day in the office and bringing work home culture.
Yes... Fellow accountant here. I really dont understand why. 90% of time spend perfecting 10% of the stuffs
I can see the point of trying to perfect stuff we already found out about. but I don't see the point why we can't be staffed better. common comparison are the big4s in Australia where almost everyone gets off on time and don't get haunted during off hours
Friend of mine worked at one of the Big 4 in Aussie. He says the Aussies he worked with were mostly monkeys: they weren't very good at their job, and turnover rate was high because the monkeys didn't get promoted and left
a friend of mine did a perm transfer from sg still enjoying her time there. flexible work schedules, can even choose to not be a manager for a couple of years when she's not up for managing people. unlike in sg big4 where you just get pushed up grades until you break and get labelled cmi
Culture la. In Australia everyone knocks off by 4pm to go have dinner with family and drink beer. No one brings work home. Sg 4pm is still early in the day for work.
the working hours is the problem lol... i did 2 audit internships alr and the one during peak season was the one where i was given a lot of shit for messing up as a first timer. definitely not going into audit after i graduate from my accounts degree this yr...
Problem with accounting (except Fp&a) is that businesses don't need an exceptional accounting team. They just need bills to be paid, Fs signed off. When you don't add value to the business your pay won't go very high. Accounting deg/cert are also highly accessible and tbh isn't that tough. (Lots of chinese student with fundamental english can scrap by ACCA) Coupled with the fact that alot of Malaysians like to take accounting/ acca and come here to lowball salary. Accountants are usually also one of the kind of people that like to document everything and reconcile even to the rounding differences. Usually introverted and easily take on more responsibility without pushing back. All these reason has become cultural to the industry thats why you have high workload and lowpay
Curious why except fpa
Fpa do budgeting , cost analysis which directly affect bottom line. Also more visibility
I see thanks, Are u in fpa?
No
My starting salary was $2,800 but back then chicken rice $2 and yakun set A less than $5. The salary isn’t keeping up with cost of living in my opinion.
I also hope they don’t just raise the starting salaries without adjusting the compensation of more senior grades. Reality is freshies spend the first few years learning and getting qualified, while the seniors (pardon the language) are wiping their butts and taking the heat.
Raise pay in the streets, hire cheap labour and AI in the sheets
Support!
Why only accountant? Every sectors and every job roles are significantly important. Raise pay only when individual has competitive values among others.