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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...
All three of my mentees passed - I'm so incredibly proud of them. Each of them had their own challenges - as we all do - and all of them were successful. The only thing as good as passing the exam is seeing your friends pass. They're out still partying, catching up on missed sleep, or still jumping around with joy and relief. Congratulations also to young Mr. Direnfeld, CA student blogger and another successful writer! Passing the UFE: significantly more challenging and satisfying than winning the Fruit Loops Olympics While scanning through the results list, I realized a friend from elementary school also passed - congrats to her as well!. Now the only question is - why did the ICAO decide not to publish the passing rate for Ontario? Other provinces have revealed the overall national pass rate is 71.7% - thanks for the heads-up, Bill . Is Ontario afraid of a little competition from Quebec? Oh come on now. One of my colleagues, another successful writer, is so full of increased...
Congratulations to the successful writers! The above link takes you to the Ontario UFE / EFU results. EFU is the French acronym for the Uniform Final Evaluation. If you're in Quebec you've been partying since last night - they get their results the night before, for some reason. And Atlantic Canada finds out early in the morning too - so I've already been congratulating my Eastern Canadian mentee in advance of the Ontario results.
DJ'ing, photography, moral support: just some of the other roles you find yourself playing as a CA , I've found to my delight this fall. Tonight all the nervous writers of the 2008 UFE will sooth their nerves in anticipation of the final leg of the nervous wait until the 2008 UFE results are released. The UFE is the Uniform Final Evaluation exam: last step in the 'academic' part towards becoming a Chartered Accountant in Canada and Bermuda. In this age of electronic everything, you would think they could expedite the process. But then again, even 'electronic everything' can fail, which explains why the various provincial institutes take their time assembling their results before unleashing the life-changing news. Making their lists, and checking them twice. The UFE hall, as it looks in the middle of the September trials. As usual, I have no idea where most other parts of Canada will get their news, and for that I apologize. If any readers in those provinces wants...
One of the rites of passage for CA students is filling out their professional experience declaration. Every province in Canada has its own twist, but in Ontario you fill out the CA Student Experience Certification Report.
One of the trickiest questions you'll be challenged with - aside from pulling the math from your timesheet reports for the 30 months you spent getting your 2500 hours - will be a simple bit of trivia.
What's my firm's ICAO #?
Sure, you could call them to ask. And if you're lazy you will. Or maybe you know someone in your company who recently figured it out the hard way.
But since you're already here, read on to learn the quick and easy way.
I just wrote a post inspired by an earlier article by Steve McIntyre-Smith, but that wasn't the only commentary on his writings I decided to prepare. I was also intrigued by his note regarding the fact that only 953 people, out of 2357 nationally, successfully passed the UFE in Ontario last year . He goes on to speculate about the demographic time bomb facing the profession. In the near future, the baby-boomer CAs are going retire. Steve, as are many, is worried that not enough students are joining the profession to fill their spots. He argues that current CAs should do more to "sell" the CA designation. When asked "what do you do?", they need something captivating to share with the listener, instead of just saying, "I'm a CA". Instead, saying something like "I make millionaires" through the work you do is more likely to grab people's attention. When speaking to junior staff, I myself have always liked to half-jokingly point out that...
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...
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...
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...
Neil has a fun little conversation going on the topic of the 2007 UFE . The discussion branched off into the question of why Ontario did worse than the national average and what could be done to improve matters. Could forcing candidates into a 2-year program improve matters? Paul says no, " Low provincial/regional pass rates are always hard to swallow and can undoubtedly be improved by increasing the amount of screening and the length of the education period prior to allowing a UFE candidate to write for the first time. However, I question whether a higher UFE pass rate would make the program more attractive to potential entrants. After all, what’s the benefit of making it easier to get THROUGH the UFE if it makes it harder to get TO the UFE in the first place?" Assuming pass rates of 80, 80 and 75% on the three exams, the average first year writer has a 48% chance of passing, and Paul says that this is still better than the 0% chance you have of "passing" in your first...