grammaticality - Which is correct: "There are not any employees" or "There is not any employee"?

Sometimes I see two variants of following sentence:

• "there are not any employees" in the department


• "there is not any employee" in the department

What is the correct sentence?

Answer

As long as you are referring to more than one subject, I would go with:

There are not any employees in the department.

For referring to a single instance, I would go with "there is no"

There is no employee in the department.

If the topic has no plural form (or is rarely used with a plural form), then I would consider "there isn't any":

"There isn't any water" = There is no water