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No doubt in direct response to my last post , the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario has just announced a wonderfully charitable and clever rule change for CA students who aren't currently employed by a CA firm. Clearly the snark worked its magic Until now, if you wanted to write the CA accounting exams in Ontario, you had to be employed by an approved CA training office - a "CATO". With the recent wave of layoffs and the resulting shortage of vacancies at CATOs, it's been understandably difficult for many people to sign up, get their work experience, and the associated ability to sit for the UFE, and the qualifying CKE and SOA exams. And the ICAO has realized this, admitting just as much in their official announcement : "In recognition of the difficulty that a significant number of otherwise qualified individuals may be having in securing employment in a CA Training Office (CATO) during the current economic downturn, the Institute’s Council recently approved...
If there's one question students in university may find hard to ask - even though it echoes in their mind all the time - it's "how much am I going to earn if I get hired by a CA firm?" If you're bold and outgoing and have friends who are already employed, this can be easier to find out. Otherwise, hopefully you'll stumble across either this post or the next forum as you turn to the all-knowing internet for answers. Stefano at mycasite took it upon himself to contribute to our collective knowledge by conducting a public survey - you can see the results here and comment on the outcome in this dedicated forum . He reports that the range of median salaries runs from $29,300 in Winnipeg to $45,000 in Toronto, with the size of the firm - big four or regional - playing less of a role than some might expect. A fair question you may ask, though, is why there's a 50% increase just for moving over one province. This is explained by the fact that regional pay depends...
As I mentioned earlier, I was slow in checking results this year as I'm far from home - but Ontario candidates can find the ICAO's UFE 2009 results on this page . [Edit - summary of all Canadian UFE 2009 results is up here. ] Congratulations to all those who passed. The ICAO has stopped disclosing the pass rates since I suppose they don't like the statistic viewed in isolation - but I never minded whether Ontario had a higher or lower rate. It's a tougher program to pass on your first shot because you get to write the exam much faster than in most other provinces - the CASB process may prepare you for a longer period of time, but if you're like me, you just want to go and write as soon as you're done the CKE and SOA. You can read details regarding the ICAO's logic on this page and you'll see that 15% more people passed than last year in Ontario. If you're really clever you can probably deduce the actual pass rate. My company did fairly well yet again...
Hot on the heels of the PwC discussion regarding people getting "packaged off", comes another eye-opening post - this courtesy of Going Concern, which discusses layoffs at Ernst & Young . The post primarily concerns the E&Y offices in the USA, though there's a growing thread of commentary including updates concerning offices from across the globe. And it currently tails off with rumours of upcoming cuts at KPMG in January, though that timing makes absolutely no sense to me considering that's the start of "busy season" for almost everyone! As you can imagine from my own interjection, the comment thread is a rich trove of unverified but plausible and rather civil reports: a careful readthrough reveals that it includes comments about cuts made last summer, right now, and expected in the near future. Ironically the people responding to those comments aren't naive and challenged the KPMG rumour on the spot, asking for proof which didn't feel like...
The sad news I broke ten days ago about "layoffs" hitting writers coming back from the UFE is being discussed in greater detail at mycasite.com . Click here to go to the article and read more details about the unfortunate "welcome back from the exam, pack your desk up right away" terminations. What's most troubling about all this is the fact that the website of the firm in question (which one of the unfortunate former employees identifies here ) actually has, as of writing, a job posting for a CA articling student . Uh, what, sorry? If I was drinking something at the time, I probably would've done a spit take all over my monitor on seeing that. It's more bizarre than anything I saw at Nuit Blanche. Well, with the possible exception of the young father who wanted to smoke up instead of returning to his lady and child. That was even weirder, but only by a small degree. And this wasn't bizarre at all, just cool. In the firm's defence, their website...
The month before, the count was 416; in September the total count was only 376, that's an improvement. Accounting firms continue with dismissals as they welcome new hires and prepare for another busy season. After condemning the day-of-UFE terminations , a week later I heard that more terminations went through. Exact numbers are, as usual, hard to come by, since each firm is understandably secretive - but the carnage seems to be less severe than last year - if you had a chance to spot the warning signs, and had an escape route, it was a good time to transfer out of regular audit as soon as you could. As anyone would, I feel bad for everyone who was sent home, especially those who haven't completed their CA student programs, since your options are a bit more limited. The big upside is that lots of small and mid-sized firms still need people, even in a lousy economic time. Hopefully they'll all find a good new home. Some people find a job that's less stressful than audit...
My dear readers have reported experiencing something horrible: layoffs immediately after the UFE! Although it's one thing to decide, "we have too many young staff, let's tell some of them not to come into the office on Monday", saying, "well, let's get it over with quickly and call them to the office immedately after they have finished their 13 hour exam." Seriously - calling someone in on a Thursday afternoon to tell them they're being let go? Is that someone's idea of a sick joke? It's marginally better than doing it before the exam itself - that's a cardinal sin which I decry even more loudly, since it throws people off their game for preparing for the exam - but you would think that firms would realize that, "hey, we're doing campus recruiting right now." What does that mean? It means that students across Canada and in other parts of the world are currently applying to work for accounting firms. If students find out that...
Livent was a Canadian theatre company which imploded in a massive accounting scandal in the 1990's which we learned about in university as a case study in how not to do several things on an audit. The people involved are heading off to prison , at the end of a lengthy and drawn out legal proceeding, but that's okay because I only now noticed this article in Canadian Business shed some light on the IT side of things . During one audit in 1996, computer experts from Deloitte & Touche – the accounting firm that audited Livent’s financial statements – spent at least 28 hours evaluating the company’s information systems, but failed to detect the changes, the court heard. Any inquiries from the auditors about changes were referred to Eckstein, Cheong said. A Deloitte report on Livent’s computer systems, however, noted the company’s lack of data security and warned: “The lack of sufficient logical security may result in unauthorized access to programs or data.” What this article doesn't...
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...
This year I'm enjoying springtime as a CA for the first time, which means I get to vote on the updated 2009 ICAO bylaws and in the election of 2009 ICAO Council Candidates. There are eight candidates running to fill six spots on the ICAO's council, but I'm not here to talk about the election - though reading the biographies of the candidates definitely is an impressive way to answer the CA student's question, "what exactly will I do after I get my designation?" Instead, I'm going to look at the fifth of five amendments being proposed: Bylaw Five of 2009. In summary, it will " remove the references to the vague and subjective requirement that advertising not contravene ' professional good taste', while retaining the requirement that advertising must not be false or misleading or make unfavourable reflections on the competence or integrity of the profession or any member or firm . " (Emphasis mine) Another classy beer ad Neil and I have both...
The internet is full of lively conversations about Canada's proposed federal budget. @krisjoseph Tomorrow morn Jack Layton will pitch the burial of C Party leadership as a shovel-ready infrastructure project As with most parliamentary democracies, the government's budget must be approved by the elected officials in Parliament before it is accepted. If it is rejected - a risk in minority government scenarios such as the one Canada finds itself in - the government falls. The opposition can try to assemble a coalition government. Failing that, an election takes place. It must have been a little annoying to be a young CA tax professional with the thought in mind "this may never end up actually becoming the country's budget if the government falls tomorrow," while rushing to complete an astute summary of the budget to share with all the firm's clients and the general public. Knowing that everyone likes a little publicity, the firms promptly posted their highlights...
Right here at the ICAO's results page , coming a week after CASB Module 1 results. In less than a year from now the results will be taken offline. A tribute to privacy or something. Until then, check to see if your favorite writers passed. And to those who did, congratulations! If not, you still have one more chance in May. On a tech note, I like how the ICAO posts a temporary page up at http://www.icao.on.ca/ on results day. Nothing special, but it prevents traffic looking for CKE results from crashing the website with a heavy load of hits on the normal main page - all you get is the following today: The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario Homepage CKE Results | CA Firms And the last three parts above get linked to the relevant pages. Nice.
KPMG UK made headlines today by announcing it's offering - encouraging? - it's staff to either take a 4-day week or 4 to 12 weeks off at 30% pay - a semi-paid-leave-of-absence. Interestingly, even some top partners are offering to lead by example, including the head of the Bristol UK office . This follows the mandatory vacation that KPMG Canada staff had to take during the past Christmas break. A move like that is extremely important if the firm is serious about this policy for all staff but wants to stave off the idea that Damian Wild suggests , that taking the offer could be a career limiting move. It's definitely true that you need top as well as other senior and middle management to demonstrate that the company is serious about its policy, whatever they're trying to accomplish. In less drastic scenarios, this is also true in the case of flexible work arrangements - either in the case of ultra-temporary working from home arrangements, to actual 60%/80% workloads. If...
Layoffs are a popular topic - whether you're at KPMG, Deloitte, E&Y or PwC, or any of the other smaller regional or local CA firms, you want to know whether your job is safe. Although some firms are improving communications with their employees, in many cases people often don't know what's going on until the last minute - so Francine's blog serves as, among other things, a clearing house for news, primarily for the USA. In Canada layoffs have been creeping up everywhere, as the recession takes hold, but at a slower pace and lower overall rate than in the US, similar to how the recession has been relatively less severe, so far. Whether your job is safe depends much on who your firm audits, and whether you have lost clients in the area that you're working in - and I mean that both in the sense of local city, and industry specialization as well. If your client ceased to exist due to bankruptcy or buyouts, hopefully you can pull of a transfer to a more successful arm...
Just in time for Christmas, users of Facebook application Big Photo - which allows you to share a larger copy of the photos you've uploaded online - were informed that their application is being taken over and will now be users of the SpeedDate application. At the moment that probably means that someone paid the Big Photo developers a lot of hard cash to gain access to an audience of over 700,000 users who use one application. This isn't exactly the same thing as Microsoft buying out all the Apple users in the world, and telling them that OS X will be Vista in a week's time, but it's something along the same lines. Here's the official message all users received - the lump of coal in their stockings: "Next week, Big Photo's name and functionality will be changed to SpeedDate. Data entered into the original app won't be used anymore. Soon you'll be able to try SpeedDate, the fastest way to meet new people, so stay tuned! P.S. If you want to opt-out of...
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