PwC to ramp up partner pay packages to record highs after Covid profit rush
The UK’s largest accountancy firm has done so well out of the pandemic that average partner pay at the firm has surged to a record £868,000.
Demand for PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC) consulting services has weathered Covid extremely well, and the firm is set to publish record-high revenues later in the year, according to reports in Sky News.
Partners at the firm can now expect an average take-home salary of £818,000 for the year to the end of June – a 19 per cent increase on the previous year.
On top of that, the estimated 900 partners at the accountancy giant were also told they’d receive an average bonus of £50,000, from gains after the firm sold some platforms including its technology platform.
This all adds up to an average profit-per-partner of £868,000 – a record-high for the firm.
At a time when many industries are struggling to break even in a post-pandemic economy, the Big Four have remained largely untouched.
PwC made no redundancies as a result of Covid and never had to use the government’s Job Retention Scheme furlough support.
People familiar with the firm’s annual results – which are still under revision and yet to be audited – told Sky News that other staff at the firm would also be receiving bonuses due to its success. The bonus budget has reportedly swelled from £82m last year to £128m this year, in a positive boost for its entire workforce.
It comes after a government white paper aimed at breaking up the concentration of the Big Four auditing firms – Deloitte, PwC, KPMG and EY – stirred criticism from the Institute of Directors, who said that the plans for shared audits should be tested further before being implemented.
Auditing scandals, and subsequent collapses of companies like Thomas Cook, Carillion and BHS, have brought auditors under the microscope of the government.
The Government said last year that almost a third of audits inspected on the FTSE 350 were in need of improvement.
Its proposed rules would force large companies to use smaller auditor firms to conduct part of their annual audit once an audit comes up for tender.
The director of policy and corporate governance at the IoD, Dr Roger Barker, said the group supports the government’s aim to address recent failings in audit and governance.
“However,” he said, “as firms look to focus on recovery as we come out of the pandemic, we feel that it is right that the proposals are phased in over a longer period of time than currently envisaged.”