Trump’s racism apparently knows no limits

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Swiss court to rule on landmark Trafigura corruption case Reuters

The rewards for failure

No audit firm has paid more fines for poor-quality work than KPMG. 

KPMG UK partners enjoy record payday 

Partners at Big Four firm take home an average of £816,000

This morning, the FT reports:

KPMG’s UK partners enjoyed their biggest payday last year as cost-cutting boosted the Big Four firm’s profits in spite of slowing revenue growth. 

Payouts for KPMG’s UK partners climbed 9 per cent to an average of £816,000 for the year to the end of September, the firm said on Wednesday.

The accounting firm reported a 1 per cent rise in revenues for the year to the end of September to £2.99bn, a sharp slowdown on the previous two years, when growth was 9 and 16 per cent respectively. 

But profits rebounded 11 per cent year on year to £404mn, after KPMG took steps “to manage its cost base”. The firm cut 200 roles in June amid a slowdown in demand, and froze pay for about 12,000 UK staff in 2023. 

In the same year, the firm also culled its senior ranks, leaving its partnership at its lowest level in more than two decades and boosting individual payouts. The number of equity partners at the firm, who share in its profits, stood at 467 in 2023, and was 460 this month, according to a record at Companies House.

The profit jump reversed an almost 20 per cent drop the previous year, and meant the firm’s bonus pot was 20 per cent larger in 2024 for non-partner staff.

KPMG’s profit haul leaves its partners in third place for pay among the Big Four. Partners at PwC and EY both suffered a 5 per cent pay cut in 2024, with average payouts of £862,000 and £723,000 respectively, while partners at Deloitte UK have been handed an average of £1mn a year for the past four years.

KPMG UK’s consulting arm has been affected by a slowdown in demand for advisory services, and reported a 4 per cent decrease in sales. Its tax and legal division grew 9 per cent, fuelled by changes to tax laws, while audit grew 5 per cent.

Jon Holt, chief executive of KPMG UK, said: “This is a good performance in challenging market conditions.”

Trump’s racism apparently knows no limits

It was Goebbels who suggested that fascists should blame their enemies of that which the fascists were guilty of. The Trump administration has clearly taken his advice to heart. As the Guardian has reported

Archivists Work to Identify and Save the Thousands of Datasets Disappearing From Data.gov

404 Media – “Datasets aggregated on data.gov, the largest repository of U.S. government open data on the internet, are being deleted, according to the website’s own information. Since Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, more than 2,000 datasets have disappeared from the database. 

As people in the Data Hoarding and archiving communities have pointed out, on January 21, there were 307,854 datasets on data.gov. As of Thursday, there are 305,564 datasets. Many of the deletions happened immediately after Trump was inaugurated, according to snapshots of the website saved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Harvard University researcher Jack Cushman has been taking snapshots of Data.gov’s datasets both before and after the inauguration, and has worked to create a full archive of the data.

 Because data.gov is an aggregator that doesn’t always host the data itself, this doesn’t always mean that the data itself has been deleted, that it doesn’t exist elsewhere on federal government websites, or that it won’t be re-hosted elsewhere. Further research will be necessary to determine what has happened to any given dataset, or to see if it turns up elsewhere on a government website.

 For example, 404 Media found some datasets in Cushman’s analysis that are no longer accessible on data.gov but can still be found on individual agency websites; we also found some datasets that seem to still exist because data.gov links to working websites but give a file-not-found error message when trying to download the file itself.  

Disproportionately, the datasets that are no longer accessible through the portal come from the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of the Interior, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency. But determining what is actually gone and what has simply moved or is backed up elsewhere by the government is a manual task, and it’s too early to say for sure what is gone and what may have been renamed or updated with a newer version.”