EY, one of the Big Four accounting firms, recently dismissed dozens of US employees after discovering they attended multiple training sessions at the same time.
The employees had participated in the company’s “Ignite Learning Week” this spring, an event designed to help staff earn continuing professional education (CPE) credits required for their roles.
The fired employees argued they were not trying to bypass the system or accumulate credits faster but were attempting to attend as many valuable sessions as possible. They claimed EY fostered a culture of multitasking and that there was no explicit rule against attending two sessions simultaneously.
“We work with multiple monitors and just wanted to make the most of the sessions offered,” said one former employee.
However, EY stated that these actions violated the company’s code of conduct.
“Our core values of integrity and ethics are at the forefront of everything we do,” the firm said in a statement.
The company emphasized that disciplinary action was necessary for those found breaching US learning policies and global ethical standards.
The incident has sparked internal debate at EY about business ethics and the firm’s handling of employee training. Critics within the organization questioned whether the punishment was too harsh and pointed to the lack of guidance against attending overlapping sessions. Some suggested that the company’s system, which allowed for multiple Zoom meetings and counted overlapping credits, might be partly to blame.
This comes after EY was fined $100 million by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in 2022 for cheating on ethics exams. The firm has since taken a stricter approach to monitoring staff training and updated its guidelines, now explicitly stating that employees should not attend multiple sessions at once.
With input from Fortune and Irish Times.
