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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...
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...
There's a relatively new site commenting on accounting for accountants, students and the like, The Accounting Onion . It took me a moment to realize there's no relation to The Onion , America's Finest News Source, but it looks just as interesting, and perhaps more useful to CAs, CPAs, and allied folk. The same lack of time that has caused my postings to nosedive will keep me from going through all the entries there, but this one caught my eye - it's about PCAOB inspections . Basically, all audit firms in the US are subject to inspection, but it's the big 4 that take care of 99% of the revenue being churned through the US economy. So spending more than 1% of your time auditing companies that represent 1% of US corporate revenue - to simply things - is, according to Tom Selling, a misallocation of resources. It would, of course, make more sense to more efficiently focus on areas where you're going to have the biggest hurt - larger companies. Then again, if a large...