PwC reviews

--Virtually none of the Staff, most with Accounting/Finance majors and backgrounds, understand the Firm's stupifyingly confusing and non-intuitive finance systems. They are not trained in it and leave most of the background financial work to be done by the Executive Assistants - none are CPAs and most do not have a college degree. Even most of the Staff who actually use the systems do not understand them; mistakes are rampant. --The Help Desk for general assistance has been outsourced to India; the Financial Help Desk has been outsourced to Uruguay. People in those groups are not members of the Firm, yet have access to our confidential and financial information and systems. --The Assistants are basically slaves, and they let you know it. The raises are poor, never even covering cost of living increases. Lying, competition, favoritism and back-stabbing at the Assistant level is a way of life. Morale has been in the basement for years owing to the lack of inclusion, but by now it is in the sub-basement.

Unlike most consulting firms, PwC does not have an up-or-out structure, which results in a lot of incompetent people who are perfectly happy to stay where they are at. This also means that there is no clear cut path to making Partner should you choose, and a lot more chaff than wheat. Furthermore, while PwC pays well, their benefits (especially health and retirement plans) are pretty dismal. It is so poor that I am on my wife's healthcare plan as her spouse, which offers me more than PwC's own plan. As a large firm with audit and tax divisions, PwC also comes with a lot of regulatory and other overhead, which impacts the amount of time you can spend on your actual engagements. Unlike the consulting divisions of other, similar companies (e.g. Deloitte), PwC's consulting analytics are all run by the engagement teams (e.g. expense reports, engagement margins etc). So, this adds additional overhead to already overworked teams.