EY's approach differs in several aspects from its rivals.

While KPMG and PwC made firm-wide announcements outlining the details of their internal COVID-19 response, Mr Johnson's regular firm-wide video messages have not detailed the extent of the cuts to individual divisions and sought to provide reassurance to partners and employees.

KPMG and PwC have announced pay cuts where partners take a bigger hit than employees while still having to work their normal hours.

EY has emulated PwC's approach of cutting hours and pay in tandem but is doing so for partners and staff. As EY's partners own equity in the firm and are paid a share of the business' profits rather than a salary, the mechanisms through which their pay would be cut to match staff cuts is unclear.

PwC reduced the hours and pay of the majority of staff by 20 per cent. KPMG has asked staff to take a 20 per cent pay cut for the next four months – or 7 per cent annually – without a commensurate cut in hours and made 200 redundancies.

Both PwC and KPMG also reduced partner pay by 30 to 40 and 17 per cent respectively annually.

Deloitte is shutting down the firm for five days next week and will make more announcements about their COVID-19 response on Wednesday.

EY's cuts will be in place between May and July, and have already begun across different practice groups. Some staff had their hours reduced before the Easter long weekend, while others were told they would learn their new arrangements this week.


Returning to regular hours would be dictated by client demand, Mr Johnson said.

"We will continue to monitor the situation and flex according to demand, where demand for our services in specific parts of our business becomes more certain and stabilises our people will return to their usual working hours."

Annual leave requests

As with other firms, EY is also asking staff to take annual leave.

"We encouraged everyone not engaged on chargeable work to take leave over, or around, Easter. The response from our people to these requests has been greatly appreciated," Mr Johnson said.

While staff were technically asked to take leave over Easter, the strength of that request again varied depending on practice group.

In the transaction advisory team, for example, anyone not taking a week off over Easter required the express approval of the practice group's Oceania managing partner David Larocca, a staff email revealed.


Any exceptions to the leave request would only be granted to staff with "significant chargeable client engagements" over the break, Mr Larocca told his team.

"We are balancing remaining open for business with managing the capacity as a business," he said.

The firm's people partner, Kate Hillman, told staff that they may need to go into negative annual leave to meet the firm's mandated leave policy.

Mr Johnson warned these measures may not be enough to preserve jobs, however.

"No decisions have been made to make any redundancies at this point in time, however, as we have consistently and transparently communicated to our people, where there is significant and prolonged downturn in demand, and re-deployment is not possible, redundancy will be reluctantly applied as a last resort," he said.

Again, redundancies would be managed through a targeted approach.

In a video update in early April, Mr Johnson told staff that staff performance matters would be dealt with by individual service lines on a business-as-usual basis.