A Counting School - Hardcore Chartered Accountancy

BCE sale falling through? Reporters' independence conflicts? Meh?

One of my friends just pointed out this article in the Globe, which explains how the buyout of Bell Canada by one of Canada's largest Teachers' Pension funds is on the verge of falling through completely. A teacher's pension plan buying one of Canada's largest corporations? Yes, our teachers have deep pockets saving for their retirements Of course I'm going to illustrate this post an artsy edit of one of my photos of the BCE Place atrium. I found it interesting to see this paragraph in the article: The helpful little solvency clause, however, became the deal's Achilles heel in recent weeks as financial market carnage sharply lowered solvency thresholds, leaving the company vulnerable to KPMG's stunning decision . I suppose "decision" is one way of describing an auditor's conclusion - unlike the journalist, auditors themselves tend not to think of their conclusions as "decisions" though - that smacks of a subjective call similar to that...

Deloitte joins the rest of the Big Four - staff to receive overtime

I'm not at all surprised that you'll find my site if you Google big four Canada overtime - I already pointed out that three of the big four are paying out overtime to their non-CA staff and seniors . n.b. provincial laws treat CA, CGA, CMA and CPA and students registered to study for those designations as "professionals" ineligible for overtime pay, regardless of rank. Well now it turns out that all of the big four are doing it - Deloitte & Touche has joined the party . A kind reader who worked for Deloitte pointed this out to me - Deloitte's non-CA staff's overtime hours are about to stop being "unpaid". The news isn't that fresh, but this isn't the sort of thing you see on the front page of the newspaper - unless you Googled "deloitte Canada overtime" you might not be aware of it. All the facts for Deloitte are available at the website they setup otplan.ca - a URL which redirects straight to a deloitte.com page . The general details...

Three of Canada's Big Four Accounting Firms to Pay Overtime Retroactively

Before I continue - there's been enough misreporting on various other sites that I have to make this very clear: Chartered Accountants in Canada do NOT get paid overtime at CA firms and are NOT going to be paid overtime. More on that in a moment, but basically CAs are exempt under most labour laws - and that's the way the system works. With that in mind, don't forget that not everyone at CA firms is a CA, or even a CA student. Much has been written about KPMG not having paid overtime to people who, it turns out, were supposed to receive it after all. KPMG's story was especially bad because, from what I've read, they had people who you might commonly refer to as a "technician" or "administrative support staff" doing work that is normally done by "client serving" staff, as reported by the Star and other media outlets. As reported in the Globe, KPMG will pay out the overtime it figures it owes in an attempt to avoid getting hit with punitive...

Barbara Bush is a Filthy Rich Racist Harpy

I'm watching Spike Lee's Very Important and epic 4-hour documentary When the Levees Broke . In addition to reminding me of many things which went Horribly Wrong in the summer of 2005, the movie plays Barbara Bush's crass and insensitive remark about the victims of Hurricane Katrina being in a position to benefit from the hurricane. Although receiving aid is nice and all, the way she said those words - and the unfeeling boorish sentiment it exposes showcases her to the world as a disgusting harpy. And, the mother of the current U.S. president too. I was curious to see the results of a Google search for the pointed headline I chose for this comment. It turns out this isn't a unique sentiment in the least -unsurprisingly, really. Her exact words - thanks Japan Today - were: "and so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this — this is working very well for them," Spike Lee's movie is even-handed enough to point out that there are both elements of not...

Controllers with real sidearms: auditors in war zones provide jolts of inspiration

Earlier I wrote about a silly gun metaphor for calculators that amused me. What I ignored back in those carefree days of two months ago, was the fact that war zones actually host auditors. Now, telling someone to "go audit a war zone" is a lot more fraught with peril than telling them to "go fly a kite" - even when compared to a lightning storm, you're probably going to get battered around a lot more. If not by shrapnel, then by lawyers and meddling politicians. I'm amused to find myself writing about this tonight - I just posted a few minutes ago, but I haven't been posting much lately because I've been busy. I still am busy, but I'm inspired to take a break from work to write something - perhaps it's the delicious dinner I had, or the fact that there's a big election going on today. With the American government's audit office in Iraq - they call it the Inspector General - being shut down by the government, it's hard not to grow even more cynical about how the US operates. Courtesy Matt...