A Counting School - Hardcore Chartered Accountancy

June was busy, so Happy Canada Day!

Happy Canada Day - 142 years young!

I didn't have much time to reflect on that or do much more than watch fireworks, since today was a relaxing catch-up day, after a hectic June, where I got hit by 612 spams - a fall from May's 768.

Busy season is a relative concept, based on how much of a crushing workload you're currently enjoying compared to other times of the year. Oddly enough I got to experience what's essentially busy season in what's usually the slow season for most people around here. But that's ok, now I get to enjoy a brief lull before the storm of 'real' busy season hits in the fall.

The other concept of "relativity" regarding busy season is that where you're busy depends not only on your job and department, but your hemisphere. It's winter in Australia now and from what I understand, the madness of busy season is in full swing there.

And yes, I don't understand how they thought "Fly Girls" would somehow make sense either. I guess that's the Canadian in me.

Toronto's strike is on: they must have spent a lot of money on these signs

Toronto's on strike. Two of the city workers' unions are, anyway. And from one union only 5% of union membership turned out to vote on the long weeknd in May. Great timing on the part of union leadership to ensure that they'd get only the diehard "hell no, we won't work" crowd to come out.

The city no doubt knew this was a foregone conclusion given they invested thousands of dollars in "out of order" signs for public garbage cans. No wait, I take it back. Turns out garbage workers were already on strike for eight days and I hadn't noticed. Oh well, it's still bizarre to be putting up these signs.

No wait again, that article is from 2002. The strike just started.

Brilliant. I wonder if any lazy journalists will start plagairizing from the 2002 article anyway? We can only hope, for the laughter. Oddly enough the first thing CBC does is reference the 2002 strike talking about 2009.

Going back to those signs, I've already seen kids ripping off the cans to use for their own creative purposes.

I forgot to add the www.krupo.ca watermark on that photo, so let's all pretend it's there.

At least the city is providing more subidized art supplies.

Rumour has it that happy-to-have-a-job city staff are setting up a facebook protest group to indicate

The irony, of course, is that if all those happy staff actually had no lives and went to the remote Scarborough voting location in May to cast their ballots the strike wouldn't have happened in the first place, but more importantly - what is up with group leaders - on both sides - who insist on going to the brink and indulging in strikes and lockouts when they could just come up with a compromise which would save everyone a great deal of hassle and venom?

At least the city news bureau types will have something interesting to write about as garbage starts piling up on city streets and less ambulances are available to carry away casualties.

Oh, and if you're not from around here or just too lazy to look it up, here's the main bone of contention - the ability to "bank" sick days.

At the center of the contract dispute is an existing perk that allows workers to bank unused sick days and cash them in when they retire, a practice the city of Toronto wants to abolish because it says it will cost it hundreds of millions in payouts over the years. Workers are currently entitled to 18 sick days a year.

Sad.

Actually check out the CBC article because listening to union reps posture is hilarious.

"At 9:30 this evening, the City of Toronto tabled a proposal that we considered to be complete garbage," CUPE Local 416 president Rob Ferguson said Sunday. "It was a vicious attack on our membership, an unwarranted attack."

The only garbage I see is the refuse piling up on the streets because you're expecting the middle of the worst recession in decades to be a good time to be attempting to win big in contract negotiations.

Wow.

What I consider worst about this is the childish use of invective. "A vicious attack" is when paramilitaries come to your house, drag you outside, and shoot you in the back of the head in front of your wife and children. Try being a union official in Columbia. Then you have the right to make dramatic claims.

I have sympathies for unions facing genuine trouble.

If you're earning $50,000 a year to collect money from people in a booth all day, you have got to be kidding me.

The point made by Local 79's president is even better, in that it's at least less insulting to people's intelligence: "CUPE Local 79 president Ann Dembinski said the inside workers represented by her union were striking because they were asked to make concessions that other city workers — like police and firefighters — didn't have to make."

Fair enough. And I suppose lifeguards risk their lives sometimes.

But, guess what? Police and firefighters risk their lives on a daily basis.

Aside from the elite band rockstars known as lifeguards and similar people who have to go out there and put their necks on the line, most of you don't.

So suck it up and smell the massive expansion in welfare rolls and other drains on the city's coffers.

If you want more money, find a job that's less secure than your sinecure for life.

Having said all this, how can you be creating and dumping this much garbage after just one day of the strike?

Telus shows why it's good to have friendly and helpful staff

Last week I wrote about a little billing fiasco on my last bill - the week was so busy I didn't end up calling back until today to find out if there was a solution.

There in fact was - Telus' IT guys did a good job of quickly repairing the issue which made incoming messages look like they were outgoing if they were from a certain website.

I vowed to try and milk this inconvenience for free perks, but the staff I dealt with were friendly and even sympathetic - talking about how they understand this is annoying. As a result, not only did I not feel much in the way of annoyance, I forgot about my grand plan to win additional perks.

I still might have remembered to ask if this started to turn into a hassle, but I was quickly transferred from the initial calltaker to an even wiser member of the team who quickly tracked down the correct incident ticket, made sure I would get the correct credit applied to my next bill, and apologized again for their gaffe.

So there you have it - anecdotal proof that having well trained, polite and competent staff ultimately saves your business money in the form of less credits spent on making up for your other mistakes.

The steak was a bit burnt, but the staff was so friendly and helpful in helping us find out way out of Georgetown that we almost forgot all about it - except for the photo taken for posterity.

Brace yourself for big bills Telus customers: incoming Twitter messages are being tracked as outgoing.

If you're a Telus customer using twitter to get SMS updates, and you don't have an unlimited text messaging plan, get ready for a potentially nasty bill.

Although the USA has enjoyed this feature since the dawn of time, for the past few months Canadians weren't able to receive updates from twitter on their cell phones until the Canadian cell phone companies and Twitter sorted things out amongst themselves.

Last month Telus caught up to the other major players and reintroduced incoming messages, which was wonderful.

There's just one catch - someone screwed up on the code in Telus' billing software, and it started reading incoming messages from twitter as outgoing messages.

Read this painful account on HowardForums if you want to see what happens when you're the first person to get hit by the billing issue.

Thank goodness I wasn't the first person to report this - when I dialed  *611 they were aware of the problem and vowed to fix things by starting an 'investigation.'

As any good IT auditor knows, that means a trouble ticket has been opened, along with no doubt hundreds of not thousands of other complaints which will appear from people like me. This will no doubt lead to a bit of overtime on the teams responsible for responding to these complaints, as well as the IT guys who have to fix the problem itself!

Once things are sorted out I'll get a credit on my bill for the excess text messaging charges, and the ticket will be closed.

It sucks when a company screws up on such a massive level but pretty much all the major cell phone companies unfortunately go through something like this from time to time so there's little you can do other than sit and wait. And get their Loyalty office to somehow compensate you for the headache that you go through having to dispute your bill to get it settled properly. I ran into one of my friends right after I saw this - he correctly declares this to be the pleasant upside to an unfortunate fiasco.

And of course, in the interim all cell phone updates via twitter are disabled on my account. It's nice to know what transittoronto is saying, but I can just wait until I get home to get the news instead.

And if they can't fix the billing issue in the near future, I look forward to a temporary free upgrade to unlimited text messaging. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out.

Did you get hit by this billing issue too? Click here to write a comment about your (mis-)adventure.

Teaching your new and transferred staff to be rockstar IT auditors

Training new people is huge in accounting firms. As you gain experience, you typically end up doing more teaching than raw accounting.

With that in mind, consider this questions, one of several I've received from my readers who have been sending me a series of interesting questions that are giving me a delightful backlog of topics to discuss..

If, let's say, a first year financial audit staff is starting their second year in a firm and transfers into a second year IT audit staff position, wouldn't there be an almost insurmountable learning curve? The first year financial staff spent the entire first year in learning about financial auditing techniques, and now has to deal with tests on data conversions instead of auditing operating expenses!"

The good news is that no, this isn't an "almost insurmountable" learning curve. The bad news is that, yes, there will be a learning curve but how bad it is depends on a few things including:

1. How closely the staff paid attention to those computer auditing lectures back in fourth year university.
2. Whether they got to document some IT controls themselves while working in financial audit. Oddly enough, this too can happen.
   
3. Their comfort level with IT - computers, software and the like.
   
4. How smart they are in general - this is obvious, but bears stating: if you're generally clever you'll pick up IT audit quickly,
5. The quality of the seniors, managers and partners who will be teaching them how to do their job.
   

I no doubt left out a few other relevant factors, but it doesn't matter - the fifth point is key: how you're taught affects how well you'll do your job when you're new to it.

After all, you're learning things that few people in the world even know exist as work.

Some people specialize in providing assistance to others.

Do you get more guidance as a first year rather than second year staff? Not necessarily.

Smart supervisors will tailor the amount of guidance and teaching they are going to provide to the capabilities of their staff.

The staff can help by volunteering information about their own skills early on, speaking up if it's the first time they've ever done a job or interrupting if the acronyms and jargon being tossed around are unfamiliar.

The advantage first year staff have is that they have learned one of the key tricks - looking at last year's file - but as good as that sounds, a strong teacher should not assume the staff already did the same kind of work before, and they should definitely not just say "look at last year's file and figure out." The reasons for this are well known: last year's file might not that be that good to begin with possibly because you inherited from another office or preparer, and mindlessly parroting someone else's work does not lead to the same learning experience as actually understanding what you're doing, including gaining knowledge of the deeper purpose of the work.

Last year's file is a good study aid - if you're looking at a complicated process, it helps to see if the evidence you received this year is similar in general format to what was obtained previously, but you want to understand how your work fits in the "big picture" - this control governs payments to those people, to allow that operation to get processed to completion, for example.

The moment the instructor realizes that the new staff has never done a given type of project before, teaching details about a small task should go on hold while the pair back up and take a look at what the purpose of the project is.

If you're testing the tiny details of a spreadsheet to confirm that a multi-million dollar project that affects billion dollar financial statements was performed successfully, it's good to point out exactly what those tiny details are in support of. Staff will generally be more interested in the work they're doing and knowing the overall context of where the work is coming from makes it easier to develop professional judgement when it comes to interpreting the significance of what's uncovered in the course of the audit.

If you think you could've been a good teacher but realized you'd rather do some accounting courses and maybe get paid more, then consider becoming a CA (that's #3 in the series).

Let me know how you teach your staff to be rockstars by clicking here to leave a comment.

A guide on how to resign from a CA firm

Hot on the heels of my discussion of when people choose to leave, comes news from LYF - he has resigned from his current firm and has done so with style.

Go read all about it. It's a very good breakdown explaining how to pick the timing, how to plan the departure - starting 4 months in advance is advised, and factors to keep in mind, including the potential requirement to pay back exam fees the firm may have paid on your behalf.

I like the idea pointed out to get the new employer to cover such fees for you, along with a smart breakdown on how to share the news.

And I most of all like how it allows him to enjoy a summer-long vacation.

Well played, and good luck at your next job and during the summer adventures!

How security websites get brutally hacked

Check out this excellent summary of an adventure in hacking.

You can perhaps call it anti-hacking, given the nature of the victimized target in this case - a so-called "security website" charging money for security exploits, but which featured rather poor security.

Remember to keep backups of your data stored somewhere completely seperate from the computer hosting your website or other key production system to avoid experiencing too many tears.

Too many CAs?

Too many CAs? Isn't that like saying "oh no, that's too many roast potatoes?" Absolute madness, clearly.

Another interesting point I caught in the interview with Anonymous Partner discussed yesterday, was the claim that we're heading towards a glut of CAs, which seems to contradict the demographic data staring us in the face.

"You simply cannot ignore economics. There is supply and demand. The supply of CA’s will keep getting higher at this rate, and demand will lag behind. This means that we have to start seeing a much larger demand for CA’s or we will have much lower supply."

This stands out since it runs counter to the claims that with the wave of baby boomers retiring, we face, if anything, a shortage of CAs. Add that to the institutes fretting about not enough students enrolling for their apprenticeship programs, and this all becomes a bit of a mess to think about. Of course, at the moment all I have is competing claims dancing around my head - but the glut of baby boomers on fast forward towards retirement is a fact I've read in the past. I'll have to find some data on how many people are enrolling as CA students to determine if there's any merit behind this claim.

Of course, many people have complained that the CA firms control the input of new CAs by restricting the number of new hires they take in, so you would think that this is something the industry can, as a whole, manage. Unless there's a brilliant scheme to lower average pay by increasing the supply of CAs.

Eating hours is not cool, and yet a former Big Four partner claims it's all the rage

IwanttobeaCA has a very interesting interview with a retired KPMG partner which features many candid comments on the nature of the Chartered Accountant designation and how things have changed over the years in the profession.

It also includes some smart tips for students trying to get hired - talk to the junior staff at recruiting events instead of trying to impress the big shots in attendance. With a small mob of people crowding around the top representatives, they're unlikely to remember you in particular, but the younger people from the firm you're interested in working for not only may have a better chance of remembering you, but you're more likely to make a positive connection with them. And the recruiting teams do ask those younger staff to identify who were the standout candidates.

There's one aspect of the interview which I found absolutely troubling, though. It was the nonchalant attitude towards "eating hours".

You ate time to meet budgets. And now you're dead anyway. Congratulations.

Eating hours means working and not reporting the number of hours incurred on a job to make the work look less difficult and time consuming than it really is.

From the interview:

Q: So let's talk working in Big 4. What are your thoughts on eating time?

"John:" (laughter) Eating time is an unspoken tradition. No one wants you to eat time, but if you eat it, they are happy. (more laughter)

Really, this is more a problem in the senior, manager levels who are looking to impress. The bottom line is important to partners, especially junior partners. I won’t lie to you. Any partner who tells you otherwise is flat out lying through their teeth.

There is no way around this problem. If I say I don’t want you to eat time, you’ll say I’m lying. How can I be unhappy with a bigger cut of the profit? If I tell you to eat time, cause I’ll write you a good review, you’ll think I’m a greedy SOB. So how can I possibly look good? Either way I lose.

Really, Partners want the all star managers to be partners. If you’re not an all star manager, eating time is one way to make that appearance. I won’t talk about the ethics or so behind that. It’s climbing the corporate ladder. You earn your stripes in a difficult way in any organization."

Wow.

Well it's not "unspoken" anymore for his former firm, courtesy of the retired partner "John" who asked to speak anonymously for his interview.

If there's anything I've witnessed during my relatively short career, it's that I've received consistent and firm instructions to be honest with timesheets. They say that there are cultural differences among firms, and this is probably a key example of actions you would expect a whisteblower line to help with.

Now, you'll notice that, even under the veil of anonymity, the partner was careful not to say he's ever instructed someone to do this, but the way his response is presented makes you question why he didn't actually come out condeming the practice, instead shrugging it off with the pat "You earn your stripes in a difficult way in any organization" response. That makes it sound like his firm condones the practice, which is simply horrible, because it can lead to the creation of a Doom Spiral.

Meet the Doom Spiral

Year one: the team goes over budget, but only charges the budget amount.

Year two: a new team comes in, looks at last year's budget, and the hours charged. Hey, it matches. Nothing else has changed, that must mean the budget was accurate. The team then encounters a job that can't be done in the budgeted time. A naive person will think that the "year two" team isn't as good as "year one". Either the quality of the work suffers as "year two" tries to get the job done in the artificially compressed timeframe, or their budget gets killed. If the firm's culture is still bad, though, then they'll embrace the "year one" team's approach of eating time.

Year three: Well if in "year one" and "year two" they managed to hit the budget, this year we can decrease the budget since we already know the job and can be more efficient.

This, is the Doom Spiral. If you eat time, you're contributing to it.

If you're in a firm where this is common practice, that's awful - dealing with it won't be easy. If your firm is more upstanding, then stand up to the error and don't allow people to bully you around.

Whenever you're challenging an incorrectly prepared budget, you must be ready for resistance with:

• a detailed account of where you spent your time
• reasons why the original budget is unrealistic (the first bullet should help greatly)
• an itemized list of areas of "out of scope" work that contributed to the overages. Depending on the job you're on you may not want to touch any work that'll put you over budget until you get explicit approval to do so.
  

If you can't defend the reason for killing a budget with hours that exceed what you were initially given, yes, you won't look good. But I speak from personal experience by saying that it is both possible not to mention laudable to challenge unrealistic budgets.

You're not doing anyone a favour by eating time. In many if not most engagements, clients are charged a flat fee based on the original contract (unless you find some of that sweet "out of scope" work), so going over budget doesn't directly hit the client. Instead, it hits the internal cost structure of your firm. Well if they're not managing their internal cost structure effectively by indulging in poor budgeting practices, wouldn't it be better to help them realize this sooner rather than let the spiral towards doom.

768 - the June total

768 is a sharp jump from last month.

May is traditionally a good time to take a vacation - when's a good time to quit?

If you want to avoid paying peak summer prices at popular destinations, May is a great time to travel. And although I thought I was going to follow up by saying, "and yet this year I didn't," that's obviously not true.

Couple the well timed vacation with an early start to my busy season - yes, while the personal tax people are ready to take a break, I'm getting busy - and I new posts fell on hold.

So thank you to the student who wrote to ask me a few good questions, including the following:

If you leave your CA firm to work in industry, when is the best time to jump ship? I've heard people say "as soon as you have your hours and can use your CA," to "as high as stick around until you're a manager."

I like questions like this because they're easy to answer and are also popular fodder for discussion.

You'll find your dream job, somewhere. Maybe it'll even have an In-N-Out Burger location and will be outside the LAX flightpath to boot.

The answer, of course, is not straightforward - is it ever with something important like your career?

I say leave when you're not enjoying your current job anymore. There's generally always a pay boost when you leave, so it's to be expected that you'll get a "boost" the moment you leave, but depending on where you go, raises probably won't be as significant in a typical industry job (on the upside, they usually get sweet bonuses).

The other things to keep in mind are what stage of life you're in. If you're just starting a family or buying a new home, perhaps a drastic career change isn't something you should be considering. On the other hand, if you're not attached to your current home or lifestyle and are ready for any sort of changes, you can of course jump at whatever interesting opportunity you find.

If you ignore the young CA's personal situation, then you can summarize the range of "career switch" like this:

• Some people hate auditing and only joined because they wanted their CA - they're the people who say leave immediately, and generally do.
• Others enjoy the work a bit and stick around since nothing else looks interesting - "financial analyst" is a boring job title to some.
• Others love it and work towards partner. Recruiters' e-mails immediately get dumped in their spam bins.
  

As you can imagine there's no single answer to this question, which is good - since if everyone had the exact same career path life would be kind of boring.

And if anything is for certain, it's the fact that CAs aren't boring.

Think I'm boring? Call me on it and leave a comment explaining why. I dare you.

Free questionable financial advice: how to deal with excessively high credit card debt

I haven't found myself in this position, thank goodness, but there's an article that provides a surprisingly candid look into the world of credit card debt.

If you're paying tons of interest and penalties on your original purchases for things you weren't able to afford in the first place, are you in trouble?

Yes, but you can lessen the trouble.

How? I'll summarize in case you're too lazy to click that link:

Haggle. Like. Crazy.

Your purchase was a bad idea. Find a way to cope rather than making things worse. 

The more likely you are to go bankrupt, the more likely the collections agency will be worried about never getting money back from you.

Before you start asking for them to cut you some slack and decrease the amount of money you owe them, read the Times article to learn about how they've set themselves up: to guilt you into paying back more money than they even expect you give them!

Though the article doesn't explicitly say how this works, it's probably safe to assume you should first add up the numbers and figure out two things before deciding on how much you're going to ask them to cut from your balance owing:

1. How much did you spend on your credit card in the first place?
2. How much of the money you now owe is interest and penalties on top of your original purchases?
   

The total balance will of course be "1" plus "2", less any money you've already paid back. Trying pay less than "1" may lead to you being a bit greedy, but amount "2" is, arguably, simply pure profit for whoever issued you a license to spend, so as long as they recover your original amount things are being relatively "fair". I'm ignoring the minimum amounts you have already paid off - if you're in a position where you're getting calls from collections agencies, the odds are you probably weren't paying off a lot to begin with. But if you were, include that in your math - or determine how much of that represents a "fair" interest rate. Remember that while banks will often give you a mortgage from between 3 and 5% these days, credit card companies are charging 19 to 29%.

If you paid something resembling an effective 5% interest rate, then you were still being relatively "fair" to them for lending you the cash in the first place.

These comments, of course, are just general observations - hence I call this "questionable" advice. Remember that your individual situation will vary, and the effect on defaulting on part of your payments may have severe effects on your credit score, if you haven't already driven that into the ground.

So try and find a reputable non-profit credit counseling agency which has actual experience doing this sort of thing. Perhaps Nancy can help you find one. My amateur commentary is not meant to be financial advice, but rather, just a way of opening your eyes to the options you have at your disposal, and to make people aware of the fact that there are people using some relatively powerful psychological chicanery to milk you first every last penny you have.

I have had wonderful success intervening for people close to me who had credit card problems - these companies can in fact be good to you sometimes - but you have be very dogged and persistent to get them on your side, otherwise, prepare to be gouged. Hard.

Thank you for not wishing me any particular harm

Someone out there must be wishing me luck. And it’s working.

Flying to California for a short vacation, I tried to do online check-in only to find that the website declared this sort of thing forbidden. Perhaps due to the fact I was using frequent flier points - or, more likely - it could've been because of my connection on an American partner airline - I would have to check in at the airport.

Okay, fair enough.

Arriving at the airport the check-in computer reported a rather full plane - the only empty seats were singles, and my row was full with three people.

Oh nuts.

Well someone must’ve decided they’re scared of H1N1 - or perhaps they just moved to another spot on the plane.Whatever the reason, I found myself enjoying one and a half seats. I can easily fit in one, but it’s nice to stretch your legs laterally.

Of course, me being me, I somehow crashed the in-flight entertainment system. I guess the system does a soft reboot while it’s on the ground. Before the reboot occurred I set up a playlist with the new Oasis and Sam Roberts albums as well as some other songs that in total numbered forty and gave the system enough work to do that it decided to choke and die.

Later in the flight, during the beverage service - no free food on Air Canada when you’re merely flying down to the US of course - the staff managed to reboot the system.

The flight crew reset while writing this, in fact, prompting me to track the system’s progress. It only took, oh, four or five minutes for this little system to reboot. Could be worse. First, it was all black. Then for a little while I was watching a cursor blink, but then that turned off. It returned to delicious darkness. Eventually followed by a Windows-ish cursor... and we’re back. What unnecessary tech-pseudo-drama.

Of course, I’m wrote this on a laptop loaded with music, as well as some documents I’d like to finish writing up, but why limit myself to my own audio options when there’s a set of foreign riches awaiting my discover?

Fortunately missing out on the little electronic goodies wasn’t in the cards though, even for a few minutes, thanks to the spare seat in the middle of my row. With that,  I managed to keep myself hyper-saturated with media for the duration of my flight - hurray, without having to pathetically hit the call button to whine, “nya, my screen’s broken.” No, I got to report it the classy way. While getting a beverage.

Even had I not needed to opportunistically seize the second screen for my listening purposes, having the empty spot means I can flail about my elbow with reckless abandon and the power adapter for my laptop has a seat of its own to rest in, rather than ingloriously dangle above the sketchy airplane floor.

Thank you, whoever’s been wishing me lots of luck. You’re good at what you do.

And to think, this look persisted on the next leg of my journey. But I'll save that story for the next article.

America's other great faith: mmm... money

Speaking ill of it, will, in some circles, earn you a sterner response than outright blasphemy against Jesus. Or maybe it's because the banks arguably own the government.

Americans are sensitive about their currency, which should be yet another obvious revelation to anyone paying attention to the ennui gripping the US as the federal deficit climbs to ever-greater levels.

The observation arose not while studying a macroeconomic treatise, but while sorting out a pile of coins: I'm taking a short trip to the US today and after my last adventure in March, I'm taking a lesson to heart: you don't mess with their money.

In Canada we treat coins from Canada or the US at par. The 10-20% difference in currencies is so minor, in Canada only the greatest scold would care where your penny, dime or nickel came from. The line is often drawn at quarters, as vending machines usually reject the foreign coin, but up to ten cents, it's generally fair game.

Not so in the US - I ended up getting a three penny discount on a purchase because the cents I was trying to use were Canadian. The cashier preferred to just declare my money no good and let me enjoy the three penny discount on my random purchase.

How peculiar.

I wonder, though, if this devotion to the 'purity' of the cashier's till doesn't have more widespread effects?

America's other national temple: the Treasury Department.

Oh sweet faith

Modern money, any beginner student of economics quickly realizes, is inherently worthless.

You can study economics for a few years, or get my lazy three minute briefing on the topic: classic money was both a medium of exchange and a store of value.

Serving as a medium of exchange means that you can used money to represent a unit of value to exchange items you wanted.

Being a store of value means that money actually is worth something: for example, a gold coin has actual value, since you could melt the gold and the gold itself is valuable. A paper dollar bill is essentially worthless, unless you can exchange it for an equivalent piece of gold.

Initially, governments limited the amount of paper dollar bills to match some proportion of their gold reserves. You can read Wiki's article on the gold standard for a pretty decent summary of the rise and fall of the gold standard. It'll argue that the French were to blame for the fall of the gold standard. Ron Paul and others have argued for a return to the gold standard, but no mention of France is made when you read about that here.

Would switching back to the gold standard fix everything? Well, read about why we left the gold standard in the first place to see that it's not a magic bullet.

Financial systems are bizarre creatures, so feel free to spend more time studying the additional details, but the point is the money now used around the world is considered Fiat currency, meaning you're enjoying an arbitrarily conceived and defined source for money.

We all agree that a dollar is worth a dollar. Which is great, other than the fact that this is a circular definition.

So saying an American dollar is 15% more valuable than a Canadian dollar, or whatever oanda.com says today, is all well and good, but we're going back to a definition that is essentially a one-legged chair.

If people get worried that money will lose its value, that has an impact on a given currency's value. Is the American dollar getting weaker because people believe the US is spending more than it can safely pay back.

I'd argue the answer is yes, as would many.

I'd also point out that I said that Bush's tax cuts from 8 years ago or so would lead to a loss in American wealth as inflation would eat away at the value of rich American's assets if taxes didn't.

And here we are

Heck,  China's stockpiling gold, and has been for a few years now. Not sure if that'll even help much, but nice to see someone scheming to save themselves. Somehow.

Americans are worried about their currency, and every time I visit, shop keepers seem to become increasingly paranoid about my Canadian coins, particularly when I'm further away from the border. But that's not really the problem.

Working on weekends: better living through public service

Fresh on the heels of my trenchant analysis cute list of quitting times, it makes sense to add some thoughts regarding work-life balance:what kind of dedication to you expect of your colleagues, and most importantly, of yourself?

How much you want to work may have little - or perhaps has a great deal - to do with your social and political attitudes, so let's try and instantly diagnose your attitudes by considering what you think of people in certain lines of work. In particular, when you think of "government workers," are you more likely to consider them:

1. 9 to 5 lifers coasting by until retirement
2. Dedicated guardians of the public trust
3. Leave me alone, it's just a job, ok?
   

Public servants working for generic Government departments and ministries of course can't be broad-brushed into any of those categories, as much as that may be. As with many fields of work, people working there face schedules ranging from those of ordinary shift workers who punch in and out with clock-like regularity, to intense regimes similar to those lived by Chartered Accountants. Heck, if you work for the Office of the Auditor General, you likely are a CA or a CA student.

Whatever the industry, dig deep enough and a common theme is that anyone interested in joining the ranks of management will find themselves "living" the job more than someone who is just there to serve as a minor cog in the machine.

What this means to CA students?

CA students should know that there's an automatic presumption from their colleagues, clients and other concerned parties that you may be "one of those ambitious types" who want the challenge and responsibilities associated with running the machine rather than just being a cog in it. CAs earn their hardcore reputation, after all, in part by simply growing up in their jobs considering going home at or before five p.m. a "short, easy day."

If you want to be a CA without being all intense about the work, that can work too, but you need to be aware of how people perceive you by default - similar to how some people will have a certain stereotypical view of public servants - and react accordingly.

It's important to make sure people don't assume you're "on call" from morning to night if that's not what you're after in terms of "work-life" balance. At the same time, the "ambitious types" can on the other hand, use the convenient workaholic stereotype to more effectively sell themselves to people looking to hire a dedicated professional who won't call it quits until the job's done.

Working on Saturdays - or, gasp, Sundays?! - is another place where this idea of a normal "quitting time" rears its head. 

The advent of telecommuting and flex time has no doubt drastically changed how professionals view a normal day - and a normal week - it's possible to get more work done from home rather than in the office in some situations, and smart managers will recognize that. If I'm feeling particularly enthusiastic, I'll sometimes get a head start on a long week by taking care of some work from home on Saturday. Or if the week was rather long and brutal, I may just kick back and leave the laptop off for two days straight. It's a wonderful feeling assuming you have the luxury of leaving the remaining work for Monday.

During busy season in AuditLand you may, however, find there is an expectation that you will trek down to a client site or your head office to finish work. It doesn't matter to some if you could just as effectively do things from home and address questions via instant messenger programs or phone. They want you showing your face to assist with some tedious bit of drudgery. The likelihood of this unfortunate scenario increases exponentially in direct correlation to the proportion of the audit being documented in that most unholy of files - the paper audit file.

Many CAs treat this as a price of admission to the profession.

Others artfully - or merely fortuitously - manage to dodge it by landing quickly in a place where working on the weekend - or past 6 or 7 - is treated as a silly counter-productive way of getting things done. Or they digitize every paper audit file they encounter for the good of themselves and the future generations, not to mention the trees and other resources that get saved as a result. My job satisfaction is easily doubled from the simple fact that I work with people who respect and encourage doing work in an all-electronic format.