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Pricewaterhouse cuts 1,000
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October 28, 1999: 2:58 p.m. ET
Largest accounting firm cutting U.S. support staff, will keep recruiting others
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - PricewaterhouseCoopers, the world's largest accounting and consulting firm, plans to trim about 1,000 of its 10,000 administrative and internal support staff in the United States, the company said Thursday.
The firm, which was formed by a merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand on July 1, 1998, will lay-off about 750 employees, starting Tuesday, and achieve the other cuts through voluntary attrition and a continued hiring freeze, company spokesman Steven Silber said.
"There are no partners, no one on the client service side," Silber said. "It's human resources, finance, marketing, etc. Recruitment for client service positions in growth areas will remain aggressive."
When the merger was announced Sept. 18, 1997, the companies said they didn't intend any layoffs.
"Merged companies normally enact much more severe reductions much more quickly," Silber said. "We focused on bringing new product and services to market. As a consequence of efforts to ramp up, our infrastructure costs grew substantially, to the point where they are not in line with our needs now."
PricewaterhouseCoopers is a privately held partnership. According to an internal memo reported in the Wall Street Journal, the company still is seeing healthy revenue growth. But it doesn't feel it can make the planned $3 billion in investments over the next three years, and without the cuts in infrastructure there could be cuts in the anticipated 12 percent growth in per-partner income. Silber didn't deny that portion of the report when asked about it.
"All I would stress is the word 'if'," he said. "If we allowed this situation to go uncorrected, we would seriously hinder our ability to maintain growth and add new products and services." 
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