PwC Australia’s EAs to spend over half the working week in-office

PwC Australia has confirmed that its Australian-based executive assistants will spend at least 60 per cent of their working week in the office.

“This will be a phased approach, effective late January 2027,” a PwC spokesperson told Accounting Times.

“EAs play an important role in supporting partners and teams across the firm, and a more regular and predictable in-office presence will strengthen collaboration, coaching, knowledge sharing and connection across the Australian EA community,” the spokesperson continued.

“Existing flexible working arrangements and individual circumstances will continue to be considered."

This follows PwC shifting over half of its Australian-based EA resourcing to Manila in May.

In this announcement, the firm also confirmed that it planned to lay off 48 executive assistant roles in Australia, with all of these coming after a review of its 2019 offshoring and onshoring EA plan.

“Following a recent review of our EA model, the firm will transition an additional number of EA roles to our existing PwC Acceleration Centre in Manila,” it said in May.

Further, following rival KPMG’s failure to meet audit tender criteria, PwC retained the audit contract with Macquarie Bank in August, and re-elected its chief executive in September.

In a proposal by Treasury last month, it put forward a potential time limit on how long an audit firm could be appointed as auditor of a reporting entity.

PwC called this “interventionalist”.

“The reforms we support elsewhere in this submission, including firm-level licensing, stronger governance, enhanced surveillance, targeted non-audit service restrictions and greater transparency, would further strengthen that framework,” PwC’s submission to the proposal read.

“International experience suggests that tendering and rotation do not necessarily shift the most complex audits away from the largest firms, and Australia’s largest audit clients often operate in concentrated industries where the viable audit provider set is limited.”

This submission was in response to Treasury’s options paper on the regulation of accounting, auditing, and consulting firms in Australia.