EY or KPMG? Tax vs. Auditing?

I am in such a big headache now. I got an offer from EY auditing and KPMG tax, really hard to decide. Auditing, obviously seems a more promising career (is this true?), but KPMG did offer a more attractive comp. package. So what choice shall i pick?

auditing vs. tax? EY vs. KPMG?

btw, I heard some rumor about KPMG. ppl around me don't like KPMG

Reply to
ccyng
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As a side note, back in the day, at Coopers and Lybrand, before it merged with PriceWaterhouse, you actually did both tax and audit to see what you liked and what you were best at. You'd do one for a year or so and then the other for a year, and then you'd begin to specialize in one. This tradition also served to provide a basic, practical experience with both areas. But, after the merger, that idea was scrapped, so now you basically do have to choose between the two at the Big 4 level.

Anyway, if it were I, I would choose audit based on it being more interesting and based more on critical thinking and common sense vs tax, where the balance is tipped more towards knowing a LOT of complex rules. These rules come about through political processes, which seems inherently unsatisfying to me -- not to say auditing rules don't have political involvement -- obviously not the case, but the goal is different for auditing rules. To me, this heavily political nature of tax makes it somewhat boring, but others like being able to save money for others period through learning and applying these complex political rules.

On the other hand, tax due to its very nature as described above, is more suspectible to being "mastered" than is audit. You will likely always be on your heels either way, but probably moreso with audit (re: slightly longer hours with audit in the Big 4). It's not as black and white as tax for one thing, and you have to learn different industries on a deeper level I think to do their audits than to do their taxes. You will likely travel much more with audit than with tax.

You just need to weigh everything against your own preferences.

Reply to
xyzer

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