THE ACCOUNTANTS PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has cut salaries by 10 per cent for most of its 2,200 employees in the Republic.

PwC, which also employs more than 500 people in Northern Ireland, has also announced a series of initiatives in an effort to avoid redundancies.

However, it acknowledged that some job losses may occur over the coming months. PwC held briefings for staff yesterday to outline the measures it proposes to take as the recession impinges increasingly on the professional services sector and the clients for whom they work.

“Our objective is to preserve employment for as many of our people as possible,” the firm said in a statement.

“We are not planning widespread redundancies. Where we have surplus capacity and have exhausted all options, we may look to make some individuals’ roles redundant.”

In an effort to keep job losses at a minimum, the company said it was introducing several initiatives, including reduced working hours, incentivised leave for travel or study, and secondments to other PwC operations abroad.

It said it would continue to operate its graduate recruitment programmes, although trainees will not necessarily be guaranteed employment with the firm after they complete the programme.

“We view our annual graduate recruitment programmes . . . as an important long-term investment in our business. As such, we will continue these programmes, subject to our requirements at that time.”

A spokeswoman said training contracts would be reviewed on a case-by-case basis “at expiry” and “depending on our business needs, we may not be able to offer all of our trainees work opportunities”.

KPMG, another of the big four accountancy firms, last week announced that it would not extend the contracts of all qualifying trainees this year, although it declined to specify how many people would be affected.

PwC and KPMG each take on about 250 trainees across all areas each year, as do the other big four firms – Deloitte and Ernst & Young.