EY fires staff who took multiple online training courses at once
EY has fired dozens of US staff for what the accounting and consulting firm called cheating on professional training courses, sparking an internal debate about business ethics and the limits of multitasking.
The dismissals took place last week after an investigation found that some employees had attended more than one online training class at a time during the “EY Ignite Learning Week” in May.
Several of the fired employees told the Financial Times they did not believe they were violating EY policy and were just trying to take advantage of interesting sessions that ranged from “How strong is your digital brand in the marketplace?” to “Conversing with AI, one prompt at a time”.
The sessions counted towards the 40 continuing professional education credits that EY required employees to complete in a year. The firm determined that watching two at a time amounted to an ethical breach.
“Our core values of integrity and ethics are at the forefront of everything we do,” EY said. “Appropriate disciplinary action was recently taken in a small number of cases where individuals were found to be in violation of our global code of conduct and US learning policy.”
