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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...
Layoff talk is particularly interesting to hear when you're not on the receiving end. Otherwise, it sucks hard. Fortunately I'm sitting contentedly in the latter category, as are pretty much all my friends. The same can't be said for others, though . Playing tennis with some other CAs I found myself in a little "Big 4" mini-conference with reps from three of the firms participating. It's always an eye-opener to hear news from another company's perspective: Player 1 : "Your firm snapped up all the best employees. They asked everyone from their competitor how much they were offering, and immediately gave them a big boost on top of that." Player 2 : "Oh yeah, and your company stole a bunch of people from my group." Player 3 : "What happened?" Player 2 : "We laid off a bunch of people, and your company hired them all." Player 3 thinks - that sounds more like "picking up" rather than stealing. Ah, career moves in...
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...
The US is paying Iraqis to fight Al Qaeda. Smart move. The men are complaining, however, that they're not getting paid now. Bad move. This is, in its own way, a continuation of two posts - the one I wrote about unions and strikes , and on pervasive qualities . If anyone deserves to get their fair pay, it's these folks. Thanks Videosift , for pointing out this, sadly, horrible and tragic story . It's bad enough to be an employer who skimps on paying their employees for showing up to a standard 9 to 5 job. These guys are risking their lives. The November elections can't come fast enough.
The TTC's workers are threatening to go on strike again next month, the CBC reports . The rather angry comments left in response jive with me to some extent, though my reaction is muted by the fact I've seen how much idiocy the drivers have to put up with. Part of the TTC union's campaign is to divide the public transit service's economic value by the number of employees and to settle on the result as the employee's value added. Before the economists in the audience bust a gut laughing or just have an aneurysm explode all over their monitors, this quote from the above page's comment list nails the fault in that logic: Do the TTC employees honestly beleive that they are each worth a million dollars? Who are they kidding? I work for a company that has revenues of 346 Billion. With 40,000 employees, does that make me worth $8,650,000.00? Well put. Having said that, some of the TTC's employees do a hard job while still showing customers a polite and friendly face...
Two links to share today. First, some more of my writing at a place other than www.krupo.ca - I was invited by Nancy Zimmerman to write a guest post on taxes and was happy to share some tips. Go here to check it out . Another interesting article is this essay from the CEO of Stardock on piracy . One of his most clever points is a stark admonishment of the pirates running amok in China and other countries where intellectual property laws are a complete failure. A quote: We also don't make games targeting the Chinese market When you make a game for a target market, you have to look at how many people will actually buy your game combined with how much it will cost to make a game for that target market. What good is a large number of users if they're not going to buy your game? And what good is a market where the minimal commitment to make a game for it is $10 million if the target audience isn't likely to pay for the game? If the target demographic for your game is full of pirates...
Here's something post that Growth , Nancy and just about any Canadian should care about: a quick look at the current status of interest rates paid for small cash investments. Let's see how three banks measure up on 1 year GICs, as of right now: TD Canada Trust: 2.05% or 3% (poorly defined money market version) ING Direct: 3.75% HSBC: 2.30% I didn't do an exhaustive search because there are charts available at baystreet.ca and redflagdeals.com , among, no doubt, a few other places too that do the job for you. I figure banks must have decided that people are so sufficiently lazy that they'll take whatever product they're offering instead of moving their cash over to another bank. Only that can explain the over roughly 2% difference between the lower TD rate and the over 4% rates on redflag . What I like about redflag's site is that you can sort by any column, making it easy to identify who gives the best 1-year or 5-year rate. I had trouble confirming the 4.4% rate...
Last fall I was ready to write up a little article about the lack of glamorous in business travel. Well, then I got busy, put writing on hold, got to travel to Europe for a couple of weeks of work, and found the idea had shelved itself but quickly and quietly. Having said that, check out Gelato baby's account of a 36 hour trip home from Helsinki with an emergency stop in Glasgow to see how quickly things can go sour. It's a very amusing article. It also reveals how quickly travel can go wrong. All you need is one big missed flight to throw you for a loop. Which segues to the fact that it's been almost a year since my last vacation. It's about time to start planning the next one. This time it's going to be the West Coast. I'm not done going through the list of friends who have put down roots out there, but at the moment it's looking like I'll be able to see 15 or more people in 7 cities over a 10 day period. Wait, I just thought of another three. Make it...
Wow, the federal government is doing a budget "consultation" (which is "not a poll", they say). Interesting . Thanks to Nancy Z for the link. It's a 1-7 scale. I assume 1 means top priority. Interestingly the government insists on knowing your income level when you complete the survey. No, "I prefer not to say" option. I guess they think we can trust them - or else we'll lie and make up a fake answer?
Study the logic in the following exchange from this doctor's blog : Several years ago a wise man said something to me that really impacted my life. He was a Pharma drug rep, but prior to that, he was an accountant for a financial service company. One day, during his old career, he had an epiphany of sorts when he was conversing with an investment banker. The accountant lamented to the banker, "How come you make so many times what I make?" The banker responded, off handedly, "Because I make money and you cost money." "Because I make money and you cost money." Wow! Several weeks later, this accountant left his company and went into sales so he could "make money." He told me that story over dinner one night and I had epiphany of my own. There are 2 types of people in the world: those who make money and those who cost money. People that make money will always be worth more than those who cost money. Most of us fall into the cost money category. Think...
Some young man - for all I know, he could even work in the same building as me - writes about his personal finances, and considers the Toronto real estate situation . He identifies two groups of buyers, young urban professional types, and older boomers who want a maintenance-free lifestyle. Well, there's another group - foreign (and domestic) investors who then rent out the pads. And I glare angrily at them for keeping up demand on the market, which keeps prices from slumping in the face of the construction boom gripping the city. Like me, he doesn't like the prices much, nor the condo fees - bleh. And apparently taxes on units are going up super-high, which is only good if you're not living there - at least all those rich young folks and investors give the city something back. You'd think all this construction would slacken off prices, but no. That ECO100 lesson I'll always remember is the one where our professor point out that although condos may appreciate in value...
Francine is continuing her probing look into how the profession operates by taking a look at starting pay . Before we dive headlong into that issue, some personal observations. If you study long and hard, you certainly want to be fairly compensated. Having said that, is studying business really hard? Not really. Lots of the clever people I know burdened themselves with extra course loads or extracurriculars to add some real challenge to their university program. I mean, we're not studying quantum mechanics, or trying to score high marks in chemistry or biology. We're learning about inventory cycles, double entry bookkeeping and how to both fix and break these sorts of things - yay audit. But, there's a high demand for people with a schooling in basic business acumen, which inflates salaries - both of the Commerce grads, and of their instructors. High pay for instructors in Management Faculties translates into higher tuition. If your friends are paying yearly tuition of, say...
Over at one of the discussion forums I visit there was a heated debate about the reason for the higher prices of goods in Canada, despite the fact that the Canadian dollar has hit parity with that of the Americans. The debate spilled over into other various fun topics, including taxes and healthcare. One person commented that taxes have little to do with price differences, "The fact that anyone thinks that stuff like health care and taxes have anything to do with price difference, they deff need to go back to school. You don't add taxes to the price of a car until after you buy it. So this argument about health care and taxes is totally irrelevant to this thread." I decided to respond to that comment, and to then turn my response into a full-blown post. If this was only about the exchange rate difference, that comment would be correct. If you take this debate to be more all-encompassing, the cost of doing business has to be considered as well. Remember that you're not...
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