EY warns ‘months and months longer’ for recruits, calls for faster visas, reports record revenue

The accounting and advisory major calls for an ‘urgent’ increase to visa processing times as it books record annual revenue in Australia.

David Larocca says it takes ‘months longer’ for new recruits to start work. Picture: Jane Dempster

EY’s local chief executive has called for an “urgent” acceleration of visa processing as the big four accounting firm reported record revenue in Australia for the year ended June 30.

EY region managing partner David Larocca said it was taking “months and months longer” to get newly approved recruits permission to work in Australia.

“The process of someone being approved to come into the country, to actually getting them settled and working is taking longer than we would like,” said Mr Larocca. “We’ve had really constructive conversations with the government, but there is a sense of urgency around it.”

EY did not cut jobs during the lockdowns and posted record revenue last fiscal year of $2.75bn, a 19 per cent increase on the previous year.

The result was bolstered by a strong performance from consulting, which jumped 24 per cent from the previous year to $1.1bn.

“By any measure this is an outstanding result, particularly given the ongoing disruptions caused by the Covid pandemic,” said Mr Larocca. “It is a testament to the hard work, innovative thinking and dedication to exceptional client service from all of our people.”

Looking at the current financial year, Mr Larocca said there would be continued activity in areas such as financial services, where clients in the banking sector would be moving back to the core businesses, as well as activity on technology improvements and government spending on infrastructure. However, he conceded inflationary pressures and rising interest rates were likely to mean a drop in revenue.

“Obviously there’s considerable uncertainty. There’s some headwinds coming,” he said.

“While we might see a bit of a pull-back, in terms of the demand for professional services, I’m still very confident that we’ll still see clients wanting us to work with them on all these kinds of strategic agendas.”

EY’s longer-term focus will be on helping companies through technology transformations, and environment, social and governance improvements.

“Transformation is an area that we are already seeing significant opportunities for us again, particularly in climate change,” said Mr Larocca. “You’ve got clients that may not exist if they don’t do something about it, to clients that see a really significant growth opportunity.”

EY is establishing a centralised unit that “brings together capabilities from our strategy and climate change team to really to help our clients work through those problems”.

The strong result in the last financial year meant that EY was able to pay record bonuses and bring forward promotions.

“These results have enabled us to invest an additional $150m in our people, including upwards of $70m across record bonuses, bringing forward promotions and salary rises by three months, additional Covid leave, parental leave and home office assistance,” Mr Larocca said.

EY last week became the outlier among the big four firms in refusing to publicly release minimum salary bands – something widely considered to help reduce the pay gap between men and women – with Mr Larocca saying his staff wanted “greater transparency” but not to have information publicly revealed.

“We don’t believe that providing salary band information in the press is meaningful or relevant to our people,” he said.

This means that new recruits will still be required to submit a salary expectation in their ­application.