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Comment by euix | Hacker News Reader

My partner works at one of these big four companies and the way she puts it - they essentially function as outsourced expertise for governments the world over - essentially expert functions have been hollowed out of state governments and into the private sector and thus there is really no expertise within the national government level to handle complex tax and accounting situations and they are instead all outsourced to these firms.

We should really consider the present western world as some sort of marriage of corporatism and government - they are really hand in hand as two sides of the same coin.

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Yeah but then the experts at the big 4 are 23 year old grads with no experience. I don't get it.

Lends even more plausible deniability when processes aren't followed, or a "mistake" is made (possibly at the behest of the client).

Because approaching 30 and being in the senior consultant, (junior) manager and director positions ones primary job at Deloitte becomes selling / pitching work that those below you will do.

I was a Deloitte manager.

Not if you look at Audit (which is what the EY story is about). In Audit you have legislature requiring accountability structures and typically there will be one or more persons in an audit that are personally accountable about the attestation. These people in big fours typically are some certified auditors in their 30s and also a partner at the firm (40s and up)

I know a few people who went into Audit after Masters in Accounting degrees. It was basically a 2 year post grad program to excel their careers. None of them wanted to go for partner it was just a 2-3 year box to check.

I know much more people on the IT Consulting side who are in it for the long haul to partner or whatever. The job was also much better than the Audit scene, 80+ hour days in a sweaty conference room and next to no days off.

They both had he same MO, send in the 30s\40s flashy employees who then delegate all the work to 23 year olds. Once the project is in full force they tend to leave and another crew comes in who interfaces with the low cost offshore teams or 23 year olds.

You do have to delegate work in audit as well as in the other professional services disciplines. Nobody will contest that. What makes audit stand out though is that legislators require and enforce accountabilities (as the wirecard story clearly shows).

Partners and managers review and sign off, but the people designing and doing the actual audit procedures are mostly in their 20s.

That is not correct. Audit is very regulated inside big auditing companies and the processes and evidence requirements are almost always part of an internal auditing framework that is designed by very senior staff.

Shure a lot of the leg work is being delegated off to juniors but that is not of substance here.

What you talk about might be happening in smaller shops but not on tier 1 audits inside the big four, there just is too much at stake.

I worked in government and they were still obviously smarter than the gov workers. Experience is not everything and I think that should actually be a major lesson from government employment practices.

No lesson will be learned as government employment is purposefully handicapped.

How can a 23-year-old with four years of college experience and one year of corporate experience possess more expertise than a government employee who has dedicated a decade to working within their specific domain?

The latter just collects the paycheck and could care less about anything else, they won't get fired.

> We should really consider the present western world as some sort of marriage of corporatism and government

“Corporatism” is a model of society in which government, private industry, union, and other power centers are integrated, mutually cooperating, and centrally coordinated. A “marriage of corporatism and government” is just “corporatism”.

(Corporatism is an element of, but not coextensive with, fascism.)

> there is really no expertise within the national government level handle complex tax and accounting situations and they are instead all outsourced to these firms.

worth mentioning that the complex tax situations are the effect of lobbying of the big four firms in the first place.

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