Sony Pictures hack spreads to Deloitte: thousands of audit firm's salaries are leaked

By Kevin Roose | December 3, 2014 | 6:35pm

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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.

Along with the files smuggled out of Sony Pictures this week, we also discovered a cache of documents apparently relating to internal personnel matters at Deloitte. This appears to be an accident of circumstance. The files appear to come from a single target’s computer. While this person appears to be currently employed in human resources at Sony Pictures, the employee had previously worked at Deloitte, and had saved some files. These were exfiltrated with the other documents by the alleged hackers, who call themselves Guardians of Peace.

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Included among the Deloitte files is a spreadsheet that appears to contain 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. If the spreadsheet is accurate, the data provides a rare look inside a high-profile firm’s salary structure.

The data includes salaries from many Deloitte divisions – including Deloitte Tax LLP and Deloitte Consulting LLP, as well as Deloitte & Touche, the firm’s auditing arm. (Deloitte does not appear to be Sony Pictures’ primary independent auditor – that would be PricewaterhouseCoopers Aarata.) The two companies have worked together in the past – recently, for example, Sony Pictures hired Deloitte for a project that used data analysis to determine the effect of social media posts on DVD sales – but the hacked data does not appear to be related to any official partnership between the companies.

The Deloitte data also appears to show to a pay disparity between men and women within the firm. We sorted the spreadsheet by gender, and plotted salaries against the ranks within those genders to get the following chart:

While we’re continuing to analyze the data, it’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.

The numbers appear to have been compiled for a 2006 internal study that sought to understand if there was racial or gender-based compensation discrimination within the company. According to materials in the document trove, that research looked at 251 groups within Deloitte and then ran statistical tests to see if race or gender would predict an employee’s salary, as opposed to factors like location, job tenure, continuity of employment, and performance rating.

According to a PowerPoint document included in the files, the vast majority of the groups that were examined did not meet their statistical threshold for compensation discrimination. But 18 groups did, and closer examination of them was recommended.

“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.”

A spokeswoman for Deloitte did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A call to Sony Pictures went unanswered.

UPDATE: Deloitte released this statement to Fusion in response to our requests for comment: “We have seen coverage regarding what is alleged to be 9-year-old Deloitte data from a non-Deloitte system. We have not confirmed the veracity of this information at this time. Deloitte has long been recognized as a leader in its commitment to pay equality and all forms of inclusion.”