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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...
If you're not familiar with CA firms, you may be a little surprised to know that there's such a thing as "recruiting season." Employers will come around university and college campuses during set times of the year - both in Canada and the US - to interview potential employees en masse . The phenomenon of ‘campus visits’ is especially pronounced in the US where there’s a plethora of colleges to visit - smaller campuses often miss out on visits from the Big Four and students who want to get noticed with an in-person interview end up having to travel to a campus visit taking place at another larger school. A reader asks what to do if you had the misfortune to miss out on recruiting season - or were simply unsuccessful in the hunt for a position . Above: Non-big-four recruiting poster in Buffalo's airport. Photo credit: Krupo (as usual) I'm grouping both scenarios together because the methods of dealing with either scenario are ultimately the same. Figure out what...
One reader asked a clever question to one of my recent posts about the market's job situation: Just out of curiosity, how much lay offs are there in the accounting firms? What is causing all these lay offs? I thought the CA firms had a shortage of workers and they were hiring like crazy? I’m not really in the accounting field, so I guess I’m behind on the new… Layoffs are caused by an excess supply of employees, and an insufficient demand for their work - same as in any company. How many layoffs are there and what's causing them? The short answer to both is, "it depends." If you live in a region where there's lots of work, layoffs aren't happening. If you're in a region where some or all audit firms lost business, you'll be looking at 2 to 20 people in a given city's office. Yes, I can't give you a hard number, just some ballpark estimates, and that's because it's all spread around. So much so that when someone hazards a firm number, hecklers...
My RSS feed didn't send me the news that Neil has taken his blog offline . And, having realized it's offline, I'll twist a classic phrase and tell you that I've come not to bury his site, but to praise it. I've known Neil since a little time before the School of Accountancy, where we got to meet face to face - and we coincidentally ended up sitting a row away from each other during the UFE - and his site has always been a great beacon of professionalism that anyone writing about their job should be keen to emulate. I hope he can bring his archives back up at some point in time. His insights and observations were worth reading, and I think they still will be even if he doesn't talk about the Day Job. This is Krupo engaging in idle speculation, but when you work for industry the rules might understandably be totally different when it comes to how they want you writing publicly, especially when your full name is attached to everything you put out there for public consumption...
I'm not really in the mood to argue. I mean, I've had some excellent food lately, which should really put anyone in a good mood. But I'm still shocked and appalled. And I really should've replied to the news that photography is banned from the station with a chilly, "what for?" You see, according to the best guess of the Montreal train station's security, I apparently must look like a terrorist. Wow, they should've seen me when I was all scruffy and bearded in university. One of my friends from back then thought I was a History, rather than a Commerce student, for that simple fact. This is the second time in two months that I've been witness to an instruction from security to stop taking photos in a government-owned facility. And it's so stupid I wish I got drop the hammer on someone the way America's Henry Waxman does two and a half minutes into this video . Waxman is understandably annoyed with the stonewalling he gets from the EPA about...
I still have a backlog of things to write about, and yet I find myself preparing for yet another professional exam. Yes, despite having just received the big fancy CA certificate, I'm enough of a sucker for punishment to subject myself to the pain of studying once more. At least bringing studying back into my personal conversation gives me a perfect excuse to upload a picture of the alcoholic houseplant. Because who other than students can you expect to be drinking heavily? Well, lots of workers in the skyscrapers downtown, lumberjacks, and of course, most of Eastern Europe. I should probably know better than to try and answer my own rhetorical question. The new credential I'll get by successfully writing this exam is yet another set of letters that shows I'm a specialist in certain audits. This of course means that upon opening the book, the entire first chapter is a huge unending case of deja vu. Define what you're going to audit, design a program, do walkthroughs and...
A week after they sent me the e-mail making it official, my certificate finally showed up at the office, proudly proclaiming to the world that I'm a CA. Whee! The other 1157 pieces of 'mail' where spams that hit me - roughly as much as last month . Although the ICAO should probably be ashamed of itself for actually INCLUDING some old fashioned junk mail with the certificate - an offer for insurance with TD Meloche Monex. How. Incredibly. Tacky. Whoever thought of that idea should be stripped of their CA, if they have one, for bringing disrepute upon the profession. We have a bylaw along those lines which mandates for an expulsion or a flogging of some sort. I say we enforce the rules, even if the offender does work for the Institute. Scratch that. Especially. I exaggerate a bit - they're quite nice and friendly people at the ICAO. Their procedures could use some efficiency improvements, though. You see, I noticed that although my e-mail arrived last Friday, but it was the...
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...
Less than three years after starting work, I've received official notification - I'm a CA. I found out from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario - the ICAO - who are responsible for admitting Ontario CA students into membership as a Chartered Accountant. Thank you to everyone who has supported me along the way, jumping through the hoops known as the UFE exam process and in getting the hours needed at my day job to get to this point. It's nothing but good news today - the TTC strike is over too. Oddly enough the news was sent out on Friday but I didn't check my e-mail until now. Incidentally, I bought myself a new camera that day, not knowing the news. You could argue I inadvertently treated myself to a "yay, now you've got your CA" present. Sweet. Ironically all three photos I'm uploading here were taken with my old camera during my last vacation rather than with the new one. The last two posts, though, were products of the new camera. If...
Here's a better question - do you pay your interns a decent wage? Accounting firms are decent in that their interns actually earn money . Contrast with newspapers and magazines like the Walrus which, from what I hear, don't. How. Dreadfully. Awful. With that in mind, I link to this handy little article from Ask a Manager sharing three tips on how to manage interns. The list clearly has a bias towards the mindset of the "I can't write humourous satire about foreign cultures to save my life" Walrus crowd - sharing the idea that you may have trouble criticizing someone if you're not paying them in the first place. I still have trouble with this "work for free" concept. It certainly explains why their interns might decide they don't have to call in if they're not going to show up. But I digress. The article is, however, universally useful when it continues to drive home the point that there are other things which aren't obvious to everybody,...
Some really keen young CA students have been asking me if they should start studying now for the School of Accountancy - our beloved SOA. The 2006 edition is visible in the below photo featuring the wonderful national treasure, Mick Norgrove. And they don't mean just peeking at the CICA handbook every now and then, but really diving head first into case writing and extensive studying. My answer? Oh dear no. After one of the harshest winters in Toronto's history, spring is almost here. The next two months are not time to start cramming for the School of Accountancy. It's time to wrap up your big clients, deal with your remaining work, and relax as much as possible. Enjoy some sunlight! See your long lost friends. Get some exercise. For Ontario writers the SOA is next - other provinces have different systems with varying numbers of exams at different times of the year. Sticking with what I know, some advice about the SOA: relax! June is far away. You have three weeks of the School...
This is what I think of when you say consulting . The link pops up straight to a chart outlining a ten point scale showing how close someone is to quitting. Despite what you're about to read below, this is one scenario where you can actually replace many of the instances of the word "consultant" with "auditor" in the above linked article. Some will argue it's a matter of semantics between to distinguish between "advisory" and "consulting" work, as the Big 4 - aside from Deloitte - have largely shed their consulting practices. Yes, "just legalistic semantics." Until you identify the mindset present somewhat satirically presented by Getting Drunk in First Class . Above: And they also often stay in posh downtown hotels. Aside from being a way of doing business where you're actually setting up and running things versus just testing and suggesting, consulting has also acquired a kind of a bad rep from what I've seen . Just pick...
Insane time pressures are nothing new to auditors. It's the reason staff slave away from the break of dawn until close to midnight. If you're on a well-scheduled job, though, you may actually enjoy 8 to 5 or 9 to 7 hours during busy season - and not just if you're an IT auditor like me. Who do you thank if you do end up on one of those wonderful jobs? Your resource/scheduling coordinator, immediately , of course. But who do you thank for allowing the job to proceed at such a 'leisurely' pace in the first place? The answer? As you'll see below, it's the same person who can also cause you to end up racing until midnight every day for weeks to finish before an insanely tight deadline. Your client. A new cfo.com article entitled "Common Auditing Screw-ups", discusses the results of a survey of European Big Four audit partners who describe ways clients make audits difficult. There are several high level issues, but what stands out for staff are the ways...
Would you like to: go to work and meet people who smile at you and are genuinely pleased to see you, or show up at work and find people ducking and hiding when they hear you approach? Unless you suffer from some odd psychological condition, you'll probably pick #1. Now if you're an auditor, ask yourself - which of those scenarios describes how people treat you? Anonymous Accountant abandoned writing over a year ago, yet there's an incredibly long discussion on how much "audit sucks" and how miserable people feel in the audit profession. Sounds like there's far too many offices where: Staff receive too little guidance; Petty office politics rule the day; Every day feels like agony; Accounting students run away from your company before even applying; and People are either leaving as soon as they can, or have already left. Reading sites like that is eye-opening. Although I hear horror stories from some of my friends, I can't personally vouch for living all those...
There's no one surefire way to pass your accounting exams, but on an exam like the UFE, you simply must avoid falling into certain traps. Francine recently wrote a very interesting post about the layoffs occuring at PWC's consulting/advisory group , and attributes much of the blame to partners. What's even more interesting than the 30 or so comments in response to the post - a minor record for those posts - was the list of bullet points at the end of the post, which serve as a handy "Do not Do" list for UFE and similar exam writers. Here's the list, with my commentary inserted to make the lessons a little more obvious. Secretive about goals, objectives and results. You simply must state your major assumptions, what you plan to achieve, and how you're going to do it. Some would call this an outline. An 'outline' sounds lame, though. A strong Framework or Foundation is a bit more accurate. No matter what you call it, identify it and when you're done...
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