Tax or Auditing?

Tax
Mainly office based with largely fixed hours.
A range of clients in one day (timesheets can get annoying because of this though).
Go through the whole tax compliance process, from raw y/e data to the final tax forms.
Pays slightly more.
More specialised knowledge than audit but you do receive both accounting and tax qualifications.

Audit
Get to see all the clients' offices. Many of the big clients have amazing canteens.
Paid travel to the clients so that adds to your income. May mean longer hours commuting to work though.
At busy times of he year you may be working until 8/9pm.
Can be more boring than tax because your just box ticking but you can to interact with clients a lot more.

Don't forget that you do secondments. I'm personally going into tax because of the KPMG Tax Business school, dual qualifications, fixed hours and the ability to try other departments via secondments. I could always move into audit if I got bored of tax but it would be difficult to move into tax from audit.

Thanks for the input. I was looking at PWC internship program and they only have tax in two of their regional offices (none of the london offices). Does this mean 90% (guestimate) of the internship places are for auditing?

I'd assume something along those lines yes. I was quite surprised to see the PWC office below the KPMG one. It's literally half the size. KPMG run a whole floor, PWC run half of one.

Can you talk with your colleagues when auditing? To make things less boring.

I'd assume something along those lines yes. I was quite surprised to see the PWC office below the KPMG one. It's literally half the size. KPMG run a whole floor, PWC run half of one.

From doing an internship with KPMG this summer, I know that a lot of people working in tax have lost their jobs and so there isn't going to be a significant number of graduates taken on. Compared to audit, which hasn't been significantly effected by the financial crisis and where the graduate intake is still pretty good