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Things Are Getting Spicy Between PwC UK Employees and Lord Sugar

Posted on by Jason Bramwell

After being called “lazy gits” in a tweet last Friday by British businessman, entrepreneur, and TV show host Lord Alan Sugar, who reacted negatively to PwC UK announcing that it would allow employees to take Friday afternoons off from June to the end of August, we were curious to see if any PwCers across the pond would respond to Lord Sugar’s rant. While the firm hasn’t responded, a handful of PwC employees have on LinkedIn. And while many have taken the high road, some have called the former The Apprentice UK host “out of touch,” “old-fashioned,” and “childish.”

ICYMI, here’s Lord Sugar’s tweet regarding PwC’s summer Fridays policy:

And he doubled-down on his hatred of the current work-from-home culture, and PwC’s summer Fridays policy, in a column he wrote for The Daily Mail yesterday:

Covid has had many devastating consequences but — as far as business goes — the most damaging, in my view, is the secondary plague it has unleashed: Working From Home.

Last week, accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers offered their 22,000 UK staff Friday afternoons off during the summer months — assuming they have got their work done by lunchtime that day.

But what about their colleagues and clients around the world? Let’s hope they’re not trying to complete a project that involves PwC’s UK staff on Friday afternoons!

It smacks of an initiative dreamed up by some 30-something exec, who thinks they’re being modern and inclusive.

Well, it isn’t. It’s divisive. What about the security guards, post-room workers, canteen staff and others who have to come into work? They will lose their jobs if this carries on.

Yet an increasing number of large corporations are trying to ingratiate themselves with both their staff and new recruits by promising them ‘hybrid’ working’ — which allows them to work from home for part of the week — or full-on WFH.

It’s unfair towards small businesses who rely on people multi-tasking — filling in here and there — something that’s impossible to do from home. How can they compete?

A lot of old, white businessmen feel the same way about WFH as Lord Sugar. They just don’t rant about it on social media or in a well-known publication. There are old, white executives at my wife’s employer who hate WFH but have acquiesced through gritted teeth to a hybrid work policy because:

  1. They want to retain as many of their employees as possible. People have already left the company when it didn’t adopt a hybrid work policy fast enough for competitors that did.
  2. They know potential new hires are going to ask about it and want it.

Hell, even my dad who is a retired white guy in his 70s isn’t a fan of employees working from home. He spent most of his career at a company that makes specialty coatings, lubricants, and adhesives for the automobile, steel, and manufacturing industries. Just the other day he told me, “You can’t make adhesives and the other products we sell to customers at home; the employees have to come to work to do that. There’s no other way.” Well, obviously. There are exceptions, depending on the industry. But it has been proven since the start of the pandemic that accountants and other non-client-facing employees in other professions CAN do their jobs at home or remotely without having to go to an office. What Lord Sugar and my dad don’t get is that WFH and hybrid work policies are being done in the name of retention and recruiting. My dad had no idea what the Great Resignation was.

Anyhoo, back to the PwCers in the UK who fired back on LinkedIn this week at Lord Sugar calling them “lazy gits” and PwC’s summer Fridays policy “a bloody joke”:

We’ll update this post if PwC UK or Chairman Kevin Ellis throw shade at Lord Sugar too.

Related article:

QOTD: Back In My Day, Accountants Had to Walk Uphill Both Ways In the Hot Sun to Get to Work, Says Crotchety Old British Guy

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Did PwC Help the Fed Cook Its Books?

After every Federal Open Market Committee meeting, you can peek into the Fed’s brain in a highly succinct fashion when the statement and minutes are released shortly after it ends but five years must pass before the full transcript of the meetings is released to the public. If you’re playing along at home, that means the FOMC transcripts should be full of all sorts of intriguing info specifically pertaining to the market collapse of 2008 on or around 2013.

But we’re talking about the 1999 minutes today and that’s where Adrian Douglas at Market Force Analysis comes in. He decided to read through some of the now-available minutes (hey, we all need hobbies) and look at what we have here. Did PwC help the Fed brush out a material accounting boo-boo?


Maybe when you actually create the money and the financial accounting handbook to go with your audits you can get away with sort of thing but something about this just doesn’t sit right.

This is System Open Market Account Manager Peter Fisher speaking to the committee:

Last spring, as members of the Committee will recall, we entered into a series of transactions with the ESF to re-balance our euro and yen holdings so we could come to a better split both in terms of total holdings and the currency mix. This involved a number of transfers of ownership of a series of investments and resulted in quite a significant amount of accounting activity. In the course of reviewing that, our own accounting staff identified an error that had been introduced in the prior year in our treatment of the premium on bonds held in the accrual account, overstating the accrual account by about $5 million. In the course of confirming that, they identified an additional $26.6 million overstatement in the accrual account for interest on foreign currency investments. We have had a number of staff members working full time trying to trace the source of that $26.6 million overstatement. They have worked back through the records to December 1994, before which detailed records at the transaction level just no longer exist due to the routine and appropriate destruction of documents.

The Board examiners were at our Bank to conduct an examination of the System Open Market Account in September and PricewaterhouseCoopers also has looked over our methodology to try to trace this overstatement back through time and find its source. PricewaterhouseCoopers is confident that we have traced it back as far as we can. They have tested our work papers and agree with our conclusion that we simply can’t go back any further.

After a quick back and forth over whether or not this could be a diversion involving a few folks within the Fed working together to funnel out the money and shooting that theory down, they present the solution:

The Board’s staff and our accounting function at the New York Fed have worked out an accounting treatment to correct for both the $5 million and the $26.6 million errors. That involves reducing the accrued interest asset account by the entire $31.6 million, with an offsetting reduction in interest income on foreign currency investments. We will make that adjustment before the end of the year and spread it among all the Reserve Banks. Of course, for all of us with responsibilities for SOMA this is an embarrassing, indeed humbling, event. As a technical matter, though, I understand that PricewaterhouseCoopers is comfortable with the conclusion of both our accounting and audit function and the Board staff that this is not a material event for purposes of disclosure for any Reserve Bank.

That’s right, the Fed fudged the numbers to make things add up right and PwC gave it the all clear. Perhaps I’m a bit ignorant on how things work but “working out an accounting treatment” to scrub out over $30 million in errors is no easy feat, maybe friend of GC and former criminal Sam Antar can give us some hints on how to accomplish such a task?

Notice also that no one else gets the privilege of “the routine and appropriate destruction of documents,” leading us to ask the obvious question: how is it they get away with it?

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One thought on “Things Are Getting Spicy Between PwC UK Employees and Lord Sugar”

  1. It’s all going to change as soon as we have a recession. As someone who’s been through a couple recessions during my career, I can say this with certainty. The corporate overlords are chomping at the bit to re-assume the dominant position in the relationship between employer and employee.

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