KPMG serves as a member of the Big Four accounting firms while providing technical positions that include responsibilities across auditing, tax, consulting, and technology fields. Technology profiles at KPMG require candidates to face tough interviews, yet effective research improves the odds of successful performance.
The blog outlines complete answers to standard technical interview questions. The available information helps you understand interview content better so you can prepare appropriate answers to interviewer questions.
Table of Contents:
KPMG Interview Process
KPMG’s recruitment process is categorized into several rounds that depend upon the job role. First, they shortlist the candidates based on their CVs. Shortlisted candidates will be able to go through the interview process. Below are the steps that will help you get an overview of the interview process.
1. Online Assessment Test
This is the first round of KPMG’s interview process, where shortlisted candidates are invited to take a computer-based test. You will have 60-90 minutes to complete the KPMG online assessment.
In this assessment, you can expect questions from topics like comprehension, interpretation, logical and verbal reasoning, and psychometric abilities.
2. Group Discussion
This is the second round of KPMG’s interview process. Once you clear your online assessment test, then you will participate in a group discussion to showcase your communication and teamwork skills. Panelists will observe your oral communication, clear articulation, structured thinking, and overall attitude.
3. Case Study Round
This is the third round, where candidates are given case studies to work on and check how much expertise they have specific to their domain.
In this round, you need to focus on your verbal and written communication, pragmatic thinking, and general business knowledge. It can be a written test or a one-on-one session.
4. Evaluation by Recruiter
This is the fourth round, where the recruiter takes the time to really understand and evaluate how well you match the role. Their primary focus is on observing your personality, business awareness, skills and abilities, and resilience. It can be held in person or virtually.
5. Evaluation by Technical Panel
This is the final round of the interview process, which includes one-on-one or panel interviews with members of the hiring team to evaluate technical skills. HR, the team lead, or other functional heads can be the panelists for this particular interview.
KPMG Interview Process for Experienced
KPMG’s recruitment process for experienced candidates is slightly different, as there are only 4 rounds, including an HR interview. Below are the mentioned stages that you need to go through.
- Telephonic Round
This round is also divided into two processes; the junior HR takes the first telephonic round, and then the second one is taken by the senior manager.
- Assignment Round
In this round, you might be given a case study to perform and have to present during the interview. Questions can be asked based on your case study.
- Technical Interviews
This round is divided into three sub-rounds, where the first two rounds will be based on role and industry knowledge assessment. The last round will be held with the director, where your technical knowledge and whether you are fit for the company will be checked.
- HR Interview
This is the final interview where HR will talk to you regarding salary, joining date, and final negotiations.
KPMG Internal Audit Interview Questions
1. What is the purpose of a balance sheet?
Every business maintains an accounting statement called the balance sheet, which shows their financial condition precisely at one period. It lists the company’s assets, liabilities, and shareholders’ equity, following the accounting equation: Assets = Liabilities + Equity. A balance sheet exists to present stakeholders, including investors together with creditors and management, with data about the company’s financial health and liquidity at specific points in time. The balance sheet shows the companies’ asset capacity to pay off debts and the relative amounts of funding from shareholders and creditors. Financial decisions depend heavily on this important information because it helps users judge both debt servicing capacity and metrics tracking long-term financial evolution.
2. What is a financial statement audit?
The independent assessment called financial statement audit confirms business financial report accuracy and reliability as well as standards adherence following GAAP and IFRS financial reporting requirements. Audits performed by external auditors embed financial record analysis together with internal control reviews and transaction accuracy checks for significant irregularities. Stakeholders gain financial health confirmation about companies through audit reports they receive from independent auditors. Fiscal information becomes trustworthy because auditors execute procedures with clarity that verify financial information for essential decision-making processes.
3. What are deferred taxes?
Deferred taxation results from short-term differences in the accounting and tax treatment of business transactions. Companies deduct depreciation at varying rates for tax purposes versus accounting purposes, creating deferred tax assets or liabilities that will disappear over time.
4. What is the difference between an internal audit and an external audit?
Internal audits conducted by organization employees aim to evaluate and enhance processes and assess risk management together with internal policy compliance. The audit maintains a wide extent encompassing financial processes alongside operational components and regulatory aspects while operating continuously during the entire year. Organizations want to bring better performance with lower risks.
Under external audit procedures, third-party auditors of public accounting firms conduct the inspections. The primary function of external audits is to check financial statement accuracy alongside fairness and conformity to established accounting standards. Companies conduct yearly external audits to supply verification to shareholders along with regulatory entities and outside stakeholders.
5. What is a trial balance, and why is it important?
All ledger accounts from a business operation appear in a trial balance, reporting their respective debit and credit totals at a particular point in time. The double-entry accounting principle is verified through the trial balance, which checks that all debits match total credits in bookkeeping processes. The trial balance both reveals accounting mistakes and detects inaccurate postings through its system of versus credits while producing the building blocks for financial statements that contain both income statements and balance sheets. Accounting standards compliance with clear financial transaction visibility results from its implementation. This system enables reputation-enhancing transparency while strengthening both decision-making capabilities and trustworthy financial reporting.
6. How does a company determine its cost of capital?
To estimate its cost of capital, business organizations must identify required returns for all financing tools they employ, including debt plus equity along with preferred stock. Debt financing’s cost represents the interest rate companies pay for loans but incorporate tax benefits since interest expenses create tax deductions. The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is used to estimate equity cost as the required shareholder return, incorporating risk-free rate data alongside the beta measurement of company risk relative to market standards and the equity market risk premium.
Preferred shareholders’ dividend rate determines the expense value of preferred stock. Companies determine the overall cost of capital through the WACC calculation, which assigns proportions to debt costs, equity costs, and preferred stock costs within their capital structure. A company needs its investments to generate a minimum return that meets the requirements of its capital providers through the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC).
7. What is bank reconciliation?
A bank reconciliation serves to make sure that a company’s financial recorded data matches what the banking institution shows in its ledger system. A bank reconciliation process combines company-level cash statements with bank statement records in order to detect differences between accounts. The reconciliation process undergoes a dual verification of company financial documentation together with bank documentation, which ensures full transaction documentation accuracy.
8. What is an audit trail?
A detailed record of every modification and interaction within a system, process, or database is called an audit trail. The record system preserves important information about user activity combined with timestamp information and records both system changes and user actions to track all system events. Audit trails maintain tamper-free operation to ensure both data integrity and provide precise documentation of system activities.
KPMG KYC Analyst Interview Questions
9. What is transfer pricing, and why is it important?
Multinational corporations set prices by transfer pricing as they move products and services between their various related business units. Transfer pricing remains crucial because it influences how taxable income gets distributed between tax jurisdictions throughout the world. A corporation transfers its manufactured products between two different subsidiaries that operate in separate countries. Transfer price decisions of poor quality create financial liabilities along with mandatory legal charges and monetary penalties imposed by governing authorities. Each nation has implemented strict transfer pricing obligations to disburse business profits fairly while stopping abuses of the tax system. Organizations must demonstrate regulatory compliance through documented evidence of transfer pricing approaches together with risk reduction mechanisms.
10. What is the difference between IPv4 and IPv6?
| IPv4 |
IPv6 |
| It has a 32-bit address length. |
It has a 128-bit address length. |
| It has 4.3 billion unique addresses. |
It has 340 undecillion (3.4×10^38) unique addresses. |
| The representation of address in IPv4 is in decimals. |
The representation of the address in Ipv6 is hexadecimal. |
| End-to-end integrity is not achieved in IPv4. |
End-to-end integrity is achieved in Ipv6. |
KPMG Articleship Interview Questions
11. How to calculate the break-even point?
The break-even point is the sales volume at which total revenue equals total costs, resulting in zero profit. It is calculated as:
Break-even Point = Fixed Costs / (Selling Price per Unit – Variable Cost per Unit)
This helps businesses determine the minimum sales needed to cover costs.
12. Explain the purpose of a cash flow statement.
The cash flow statement functions as a tool that follows the movements of business cash across operating, investing, and financing sections. The cash flow statement evaluates company liquidity while ensuring solvency and helps determine how effectively a company can fulfill its commitments invest in operations and handle cash management.
13. What is the accrual principle in accounting?
Under accrual methodology in accounting, revenue, and expenses should be recorded during the time of earning or incurrence rather than at cash transaction moments. Under this accounting principle, all financial statements display accurate business performance figures from a selected reporting period. Accounting records revenue after delivering products or providing services and records expenses when valid obligations begin regardless of payment receipt date. Structured financial reporting relies on the accrual approach to produce accurate outcomes while facilitating decision analysis and maintaining consistency between revenue and expenses during individual reporting periods. Businesses must follow this method under both GAAP and IFRS reporting standards.
KPMG Java Interview Questions
14. What is a constructor?
A constructor functions as the code that initializes brand-new objects when created. Such programming constructs function like instance methods yet lack method characteristics because they don’t return values. The constructor name matches the class name in most programming languages, yet a few languages use variants. For example:
The Python programming language gives constructors the special name __init__.
Both Java and C++ use an identical name to the class name when defining constructors.
15. What is inheritance?
In object-oriented programming (OOP), inheritance lets child classes (subclasses) borrow properties as well as methods from their parent classes (superclasses). Through this mechanism, developers can reuse code to create a hierarchy of classes. Through inheritance, the child class inherits all functionality from the parent class to build upon with custom features. The coping technique enables children classes to adjust or change methods they inherit from parent categories. A vehicle class can have a car subclass, which inherits from the vehicle the attributes of speed and moves along with special features like air conditioning and fuel types.
16. What are access specifiers?
Access specifiers are programming keywords that control the availability of classes along with methods and variables throughout object-oriented code. These specifications define user access requirements necessary for both data protection and program accessibility.
- Public: Members remain accessible from all points in the program.
- Private: Members are accessible by other components that exist within the same class.
- Protected: Program members are accessible through both class definition areas and subclass definitions.
17. What is a banker’s algorithm?
The Banker’s algorithm acts as an operational deadlock prevention system when integrated into system processes to track running processes accessing resources while avoiding destructive deadlock conditions. A safe process completion sequence emerges when the system verifies resource allocation against associated processes that enable each process to finish correctly.
KPMG Business analyst interview questions
18. What is the E-R model in the DBMS?
A conceptual framework known as the E-R (Entity-Relationship) model within Database Management Systems (DBMS) represents how information databases structure and relate their data elements. The model structures data by defining objects or things (Student or Course) alongside their characteristics (Name or Age) and their related associations (Enrolls). The model establishes unique entity identification through primary keys together with relational definitions based on cardinality. Database design heavily relies on the E-R model to create a visual framework that helps effectively structure and organize data.
19. What is data warehousing?
The data warehousing process involves drawing together numerous data sources to create a single centralized storage facility for massive data management operations. The warehouse serves business intelligence functions by keeping historical, consolidated information accessible as organizations make analysis reports and decisions. Awareness solutions use the ETL process to pull raw data from multiple sources before cleaning to normalize data, which finishes in the warehouse. The analytical design of data warehouses enables executive decision-making through complex query processing and supports trend evaluation along with strategic forecasting abilities. The tool brings together information from numerous operating systems to create a single unified database for making decisions that support enterprise expansion.
20. What is RDBMS?
A Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) represents a database management design that employs tables arranged via rows and columns to maintain data structures. The relational model stands as the foundation of this system to organize data into connection-based tables tied by key elements that support swift database interactions.
21. What is meant by denormalization?
Denormalization is the process of merging several tables to speed up query execution. It increases redundancy in the database.
22. What is a trigger?
A trigger is a database process that is stored there and is automatically triggered whenever a specific database event takes place.
KPMG Technical Interview Questions and Answers
23. What is a VPN?
The virtual private network (VPN) functions as a tool that helps you establish safe encrypted pathways to another network that exists through internet connections. Your IP address remains protected by the VPN which establishes privacy and anonymity during your internet usage.
24. What is IP spoofing?
Device identification purposes are disguised through IP spoofing because cyber attackers modify packet headers with fake source IP addresses. An attacker performs this technique to trick systems into thinking data originated from a legitimate source rather than its genuine source.
25. What are firewalls?
Firewalls serve as security systems that evaluate network traffic details by using structured security protocols to manage both external and internal network traffic access. Through its protective function, a firewall blocks unauthorized users from entering trusted internal networks while blocking threats like malware and cyberattacks from untrusted external networks such as the Internet.
26. What is Ping?
Ping functions as a diagnostic technology for networks that evaluates network device connectivity alongside server response times. The APing tool operates through its capability to transmit ICMP echo request packets toward a target device and then detects echo replies. The echo request packet journey duration used in Ping analytics indicates both network delay speeds and link quality performance markers.
27. What is a deadlock?
A deadlock occurs in computational systems when multiple operational processes become blocked because they must wait for resources held by other processes. The resource-holding pattern between processes creates a circular dependency that bars any process from continuing execution.
28. What is a kernel?
Operating systems contain a fundamental element known as the kernel, which regulates both hardware systems and computer operations. Through this system, memory and CPU time functions are properly operated. The kernel stands as a central building block inside operating systems. Energy embraces a central role in translating application requisitions into hardware computational tasks through system call operations and interprocess communication methods.
29. What is spooling?
Computing technology uses spooling (Simultaneous Peripheral Operations On-Line) to hold data in temporary areas before performing later operations between slow and fast devices. I/O operations between devices like printers and CPUs receive management through common spooling processes.
30. What is thrashing?
Operating system performance declines substantially as a result of too many paging operations leading to thrashing behavior. A situation occurs when page swapping expenditures between main memory and secondary storage exceed process execution time, thereby resulting in underused CPU resources.