Walter Hutchens’ Blog

From today’s Washington Post:

In October, You also introduced a new system for determining bonuses for the company’s more than 15,000 consultants. In the past, the bonuses of BearingPoint consultants were based largely on the number of hours they billed to customers, You said. That program backfired in a very public way last week when the company disclosed that some employees in its Chinese subsidiary falsely inflated their time sheets to increase the size of their bonuses. [Link]

I have some good friends at BearingPoint in China (which is of course a huge operation), and I’d still highly recommend the firm. I doubt, really, there’s any jurisdiction in the world where this isn’t a problem whenever compensation is tied to billable hours. Using billable hours is just a bad system. It creates incentives for inefficiency, besides the moral hazard of tempting people to over-bill.

All that aside, the list of US companies who’ve had quite public problems with China staff in recent years now includes, at least, Lucent, Citigroup, Apple, BearingPoint . . .