Ed. note: this article was originally published on December 3, 2014. It was updated on January 2, 2023 to reflect current information.
We haven’t reported on the Sony hack yet because it has absolutely nothing to do with public accounting. Until today.
Fusion is reporting that among the leaked documents, hackers came across this little nugget:
The Sony Pictures hack that has sent the Hollywood mega-studio into chaos is spreading far beyond the film industry, as hackers appear to have released documents containing detailed salary information for more than 30,000 employees of Deloitte, the New York-based auditing and professional services firm.
[Ed. note: Fusion became Splinter in 2017, link has been updated]
Why would Sony have salary information on 30,000 Deloitte employees? We’re glad you asked!
It appears a single individual currently employed in HR at Sony used to work at Deloitte, and just so happened to have this file on their work computer.
Included among the Deloitte files is a spreadsheet containing the 2005 salary information for 31,124 U.S. Deloitte employees. The same spreadsheet also contains race and gender data for each worker, although unlike the Sony Pictures files, names are not attached to the salary information. The data provides a rare look inside a high-profile firm’s salary structure.
Here’s just a taste, as shared by Fusion:
Most revealing is that the data — which Fusion says appears to have been compiled for a 2005 internal study on possible gender discrimination in compensation — shows most of the firm’s highest earners are (predictably enough) men:
[I]t’s worth noting that of the salaries included in the document—which contains more than 1,000 of Deloitte’s company’s directors—the top 10 highest earners are all men, as are 22 of the top 25, 43 of the top 50, and 85 of the top 100.
Also noteworthy, despite that earth-shattering revelation, the research concluded that most groups didn’t actually have a compensation discrimination problem. Though 18 of them did. From a PowerPoint included in the files:
“Of the 251 regressions, where we looked at all the possible variables that could predict salary there were 58 groups where salary was predicted by race or gender,” the document reads. “Of these 58 regressions, 34 included race or gender as a predictor in a discriminatory way. Some of these were more significant than others. Of the 34 significant regressions, there were 18 that were problematic based on both regressions & t-tests. These 18 groups were looked at very carefully to make appropriate recommendations.”
Fusion says they are continuing to crunch the data and in the meantime, we’ll see if we can’t find a copy of this ourselves.
