EY sacks staff for streaming multiple training videos at a time

Dozens of staff at EY, the Big Four professional services firm, have been branded cheats by the firm and sacked for streaming more than one training video at a time to meet quotas.
EY confirmed that some of its employees in the US were fired last week for trying to save time by watching multiple online training courses at one time.
Staff at the firm are required to attend a minimum number of professional training courses over a year and the firm determined that watching more than one at a time was an ethical breach.
But the Big Four professional services firm was facing a backlash for over-reacting and for heaping pressure on employees to do training while also expecting them to maximise billable hours.
One of the sacked employees accused EY of breeding a culture of multi-tasking while another said EY had encouraged staff to attend as many training sessions as possible, according to the Financial Times, which first reported the story. They also questioned why EY allowed multiple streaming of Zoom sessions on its own systems if only one at a time was allowable.
EY has toughened up its tolerance to staff infractions after being fined $100 million by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in 2022 after dozens of its employees cheated on an ethics exam by sharing answers and the firm itself then hindered the SEC investigation.
Monitoring of staff behaviour through their digital footprint is not new. EY in the UK started monitoring swipe card entry data this year as part of a crackdown on staff working from home.
One fired EY consultant told the FT that there had been no warning that watching multiple sessions simultaneously was not allowed at the time of the events in May. They said: “Their emails marketing [the programme of training courses] actually encouraged us to join as many sessions as our schedule allowed. We all work with three monitors. I was hoping to hear new ideas that I could bring to the table to separate myself from others.”
In August EY, when promoting training courses in an email, included a warning that employees were “expected to complete this learning activity with integrity, including being present for all content and class interactions. You should not take any other learning while completing this activity,” it instructed.
EY in the US said: “Our core values of integrity and ethics are at the forefront of everything we do. Appropriate disciplinary action was recently taken in a small number of cases where individuals were found to be in violation of our global code of conduct and US learning policy.”
The 20,000 EY staff in the UK are required to sign the same global code of conduct as their American colleagues.
A spokesman for the UK firm said it would take disciplinary action against anyone found to be in breach of the code — including for exam cheating — and had a number of safeguards in place to check for this.