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Congratulations to the successful writers of the 2011 Uniform Final Evaluation! A special shout-out to fellow CA blogger Jaycee - she made it as well! She was posting a very readable account of her experiences leading up to the exam - it's well worth a read on her site . Ontario results are available here - it's usually available online for a few weeks. There'll be a massive newspaper ad coming up soon - per the ICAO, " A national announcement of all successful UFE writers in Canada, listed by province, will be published in La Presse on Thursday, January 20, 2011 and the Globe and Mail on Friday, January 21, 2011 ". As my two-month hiatus indicates, I've been a bit busy, so feel free to figure things out at mycasite if need details for other regions or have other questions about the UFE.
Edit (Sept 6, 2010): As per their usual practice, the ICAO has taken the results offline. You should have received your results in the mail by now - the UFE is coming up soon and you should be well into your study schedule by now! I will keep this page up as a historical record of the minor drama associated with the 2010 results release, and as an example of what the temporary splash page looks like when results are released. Original post continues: That was more dramatic than it needed to be. The ICAO must've had some kind of technical glitch which prevented the results from the 2010 School of Accountancy exam from loading on time - it took roughly half an hour for the website to get updated. The results are, however, now up - this page will let you see which of the writers passed - out of the population of writers who gave permission to have their names on the website. Official results will be mailed to individual writers in a few days. Congratulations to those who passed! Smartly...
This a wonderful and mostly altruistic action: any CA from Ontario, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia or Bermuda can click on this link here , to go a page where you can tell your local provincial Institute of Chartered Accountants to donate $25 to a charity of your choice - from a list of five, including Kids Help Phone and Easter Seals. I say "mostly" because this is all nestled in a webpage hosted by Manulife who sell insurance to CAs and would no doubt love to translate this little bit of charity into some sort of boost to their business too, but given the fact that they're simply giving cash away, I won't hold the fact that there's still marketing involved in this against them. According to the ICAO's little e-newsletter, about 850 people have already clicked, which suggests that this campaign is only halfway through. If you haven't forced them to give away money to charity, feel free to push $25 of someone else's...
There's a curious disconnect at the School of Accountancy which many CAs no doubt forget about a few years after their attendance: what you need to know to pass the exams diverges to an interesting degree away from what you're supposed to learn in class. As for attending those classes, there were always some sort of rules about which classes you must attend. Apparently the ICAO is cracking down on students who think classes are optional - and unless you have a very good reason, you had better attend those classes, and show up on time. The challenge of making it up to York University first thing in the morning was of course another one of those sick little games you had to endure if you weren't living on campus, as the stricter instructors will count a late arrival as an absence. This, of course, is one of the key reasons why many consider attending the SOA like a revisiting of the madness known as high school. The conversation I just alluded to when discussing the lack of paper...
New hires at accounting firms land in what may be a completely new culture. After a hard week or month of audits, some people look forward to spending time with their families, but given the number of young bucks and does in a large Big Four office, heading down to the local bar(s) will also be a popular option. One CA student is worried about this phenomenon, particularly at formal firm-sponsored functions, asking "you think it will be a problem if I don't drink at the cocktail party due to religious reasons? I'm just worried they'll think I won't "fit in"?" This is an easy answer - no, not at all. In any mature firm people will understand if you have personal reasons - be they philosophical, spiritual, practical ("$15 for a mixed drink, what?") or simply rational ("no, I'm driving"). Having said that, there's always a wrinkle: as you can imagine, I'm sure there are cliques of people who never escaped their frat boy days...
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...
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