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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...
This month's CA magazine features a mention of Stefano Picone, CA , founder of mycasite , but before you can read that you may read the following unrelated trainwreck of a paragraph - read it and guess what went wrong here : " Firms only interested in training CA students who wish to practise public accounting but lack the audit hours to do so should also consider hiring experienced CA students who have already completed the required chargeable audit hours at another firm. CA students can complete their practical experience requirements for qualification at your firm and may be eligible to practise public accounting. The current economic situation has resulted in the availability of a number of experienced CA students ready and able to take on new opportunities. " Did you see it? Avert your eyes children! Did they just casually say "current economic situation"? I'm sorry, I think the editors must have accidentally hit "find and replace" on the more...
If you started, say, an engineering program at one given university, could you switch partway through to a Chartered Accountant prep program instead in the same university's business school, and quickly get all the credits you need to graduate in a mere year and a half? One of the regular CA 'commentators' on the blogs and forums, sardaukar - who does an excellent public service in opening people's eyes to the "hell years" that await them as CA students, incidentally - did just that, and people wondered how this is even possible. Since I'm not really into Sudoku, and this is just the sort of "puzzle" I enjoy solving, I'll answer the question for the writer of comment #427. The funny thing about this exercise is that when you review the list of courses needed - I include links at the end of this article - many courses will count for "3 hours" even though they're full year, or half year. That means you can't divide 51 by 3 and...
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...
I've noticed people are wondering when marks are coming out for the UFE's 2009 sitting. Yes, I vowed not to make any more comments on the exam yesterday, but left some exceptions. One of them would be people coming up to me and asking question, and I'll count "people landing on my site looking for answers" as an invitation to comment. So to answer your question, in case you don't have access to your firm's UFE timeline calendar or didn't find the ICAO page - and you chose to stop reading the entirety of my article's headline - marks will be posted online Friday, December 4, 2009. Edit: I forgot to mention when posting this originally, that the lucky ducks in Quebec find out the night before, on Thursday December 3. Avoid post-exam anxiety by indulging in your local community's colourful fall street festivals . To reward you for reading so far down, I'll answer some common questions about the process. Are the marks always released on a Friday...
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...
I'm not retired from Big Four life , plus I can legitimately claim to be a little bit too busy to play " auditor of the auditors ", so I stick to writing about what I know, and what seems to interest my readers - judging from the comments and e-mails I get, the focus has lately been on How to get yourself hired into Big Four life Do you really want to embrace this sort of life. You will, of course, be considered, for various reasons, a gypsy of the business world if you join us. My writing has been slow lately thanks to my early busy season, and an exceptionally busy period of "real life" which conspires to keep my offline for a healthy amount of time. It'll resume, as it always does. Until then, a quick observation regarding the random threats to the Big Four coming out of left field . I have only the tiniest of views of how things work, so I couldn't possibly know of all the shenanigans that could spell impending doom for any of the big firms. Get a bunch...
If anyone stumbles across this helpful post, here's the link to click to get to the actual ICAO 2009 election is you have all your voter info . That link dies after May 8, 2009, so enjoy it while it's on. Chartered Accountants are members of an Institute - in Canada there's a national Institute, the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants , and regionally provinces have their own associations. Ontario has its own, of course, the ICAO - the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario , and the executives of these organizations end up landing in their positions through free and fair elections. Though it feels like it's been ages, it's actually only been a year - precisely a year in fact - since I got my CA . Wow. Anyway, due to the timing of my admission to full membership a year ago, I wasn't able to vote in the 2008 ICAO election - this is my first time receiving the Annual General Meeting and Council Election package. Having studied the impressive biographies...
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...
Tomorrow's going to be a long day, and I'm looking forward to it. It's going to be my first time since I got my Chartered Accountant designation that I'll be working at an ICAO low income tax clinic . The way it works, the ICAO allows CA students to volunteer their time, as long as a "full" CA is there to oversee them and provide assistance if needed. For the past three years every time I went, there was always a CA present to oversee the clinic, since I was still a CA student. Though I had technically fully qualified by March last year, the paperwork to recognize the fact that you've completed your 30 month 'apprenticeship' takes a couple of months to get processed, so I was not able to serve as an official clinic supervisor. In terms of preparing the returns, it doesn't make much difference whether you're a full CA or a CA student: if you know how to fill out your own tax return, you'll know what to do. It's both much easier and faster...
The last accounting case I wrote was in September of 2006 - though for the past two summers I've found myself helping the current writers that I was coaching and mentoring by marking and debriefing their cases, which is almost as intense as writing cases themselves. For the uninitiated, an accounting case is a role-playing simultation, typically written, where you play the role of an accountant sent in to review the status of some business, identify all the accounting issues, which options are applicable and valid according to your local region's accounting rules, and wrapping up everything by reporting to your taskmaster with your findings. The UFE itself is entirely comprised of seven or so cases written in thirteen hours over a three day period. In an accounting case competition, you're generally taking on a UFE-type case on steroids, working in a group, and either handing in your finished product, or, the fun way, presenting it orally. I say "on steroids" because...
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.
"Frack, no one told about this side of the game!" While Ontario's 2009 January CKE writers eagerly await their results - coming out this Friday - last week the West Side writers including one talented young blogger got results from Module 1 of the CASB . I'm glad to report that our intrepid blogger as well as more than one of my other readers got the following message from the CASB's Alberta HQ: “Eligible to Proceed” That means they passed with flying colours. Yay! The CASB's modules are like the CKE and SOA - prep steps you have to pass on the way to getting the write the UFE - ultimate final exam for CA students to write across the country. Congratulations to all. Speaking of congraultory happy news, I've made a small but long overdue update to the list of interesting sites to check out - Adrienne writes from the point of view of reason among American craziness - good times. Extended congratulations go out to Jeff, who joins the list as Private CPA, a newly...
Since November 6, most undergraduate students at Toronto's York University have been suffering from a strike that has shut down the university. CUPE, the union involved, represents both Teaching Assistants (read: horribly underpaid grad students) and part-time professors. Presumably if no professors were in this union the university could have just kept on going without its TAs. As the photo above suggests, I didn't go to York for my undergrad - but all Ontario CA students spend the month of June there at the School of Accountancy, where this photo was taken. It's a mix of small seminar-sized courses with 30 people or less, and a few larger lectures where SOA-wide announcements are made to all - generally right before or after the practice tests. For CA students, I'm curious to know what effect this strike will have.on the SOA - will it still be at York University this year? Or if classes resume and get pushed back into the summer, will the venue of that august institution...
Despite a day of rain, it's still a white Christmas outside. For CAs and CA students, it's a great time to remember to give something back to our community, while you're enjoying what, for most of Ontario, is a picture perfect landscape, as well as the warmth, love and other gifts from spending time with family, . The easiest way I can suggest that you give back is by participating in the upcoming ICAO low income tax clinics. You help those in need, among others including recent immigrants, impoverished students, the elderly, disabled and others who may have trouble filling out the simple-yet-maddeningly-complicated personal income T1 tax forms. The ICAO sent out an e-mail their Chartered Accountants members with some additional background: The year 2009 will be the 41st year of the Free CA Tax Clinics Program, and we need your help more than ever. Last year, a total of 1,600 CAs, CA Students, Associate Students and Membership Candidates helped prepare almost 11,000 tax returns...
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