Grant Thornton Moves Executive Assistant Roles to the Philippines

By Grace Kim

Grant Thornton is cutting executive assistant roles in Australia and moving the work to the Philippines, according to a report by The Aussie Corporate. It's a small story on its face, but it sits squarely inside a bigger pattern: administrative support is one of the job categories firms are relocating first when they restructure.

What do we actually know?

The reporting confirms two concrete facts. Grant Thornton, one of the mid-tier accounting firms operating in Australia, has cut executive assistant positions. And the work those EAs were doing hasn't disappeared — it has shifted to the Philippines.

The Aussie Corporate didn't publish headcount figures, so treat the scale as unconfirmed for now. What's confirmed is the direction: same tasks, cheaper labour market, different country.

Why EA roles keep landing first on the cut list

There's a mechanism here worth understanding, because it explains why this keeps happening across professional services.

Executive assistant work is largely asynchronous and location-independent — calendar management, travel booking, document preparation, inbox triage. None of it requires the assistant to sit near the partner they support. That makes the role structurally easy to offshore.

Australia's minimum wage and office-based employment costs sit far above equivalent salaries in Manila's business-process outsourcing sector. When a firm like Grant Thornton moves the function, the same output costs a fraction of the local price.

What does this mean if you're an EA or admin professional?

Be precise about what this is and isn't. It isn't evidence that all administrative jobs vanish overnight. It is evidence that firms now see EA support as a portable cost line rather than a fixed one — and they'll act on that when margins tighten.

For individuals, the practical read is this: the parts of the role that survive offshoring are the ones that can't travel — in-person client handling, judgment-heavy gatekeeping, and work tied to regulatory or confidentiality constraints. Pure task execution is what moves.

In plain words: if your EA role is mostly scheduling and filing, this story is about you; if it's built on relationships and judgment, it's about your colleagues.

Is this part of something larger?

Yes. Professional services firms globally have spent the past two restructuring cycles building out offshore delivery centres in the Philippines and India, moving everything from audit support to internal administration. Grant Thornton isn't an outlier — it's a follower in a well-established trend, which is exactly why a single-office story deserves attention.

The report gives no timeline for the transition or numbers on affected staff, so watch for those details in follow-up coverage. What's likely next: other mid-tier firms review their own support structures and quietly reach the same arithmetic Grant Thornton already ran.