A Counting School - Hardcore Chartered Accountancy

Deloitte joins the rest of the Big Four - staff to receive overtime

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...

No photos at the train station now? What for?

I'm not really in the mood to argue. I mean, I've had some excellent food lately, which should really put anyone in a good mood. But I'm still shocked and appalled. And I really should've replied to the news that photography is banned from the station with a chilly, "what for?" You see, according to the best guess of the Montreal train station's security, I apparently must look like a terrorist. Wow, they should've seen me when I was all scruffy and bearded in university. One of my friends from back then thought I was a History, rather than a Commerce student, for that simple fact. This is the second time in two months that I've been witness to an instruction from security to stop taking photos in a government-owned facility. And it's so stupid I wish I got drop the hammer on someone the way America's Henry Waxman does two and a half minutes into this video . Waxman is understandably annoyed with the stonewalling he gets from the EPA about...

Do you get interns in your office?

Here's a better question - do you pay your interns a decent wage? Accounting firms are decent in that their interns actually earn money . Contrast with newspapers and magazines like the Walrus which, from what I hear, don't. How. Dreadfully. Awful. With that in mind, I link to this handy little article from Ask a Manager sharing three tips on how to manage interns. The list clearly has a bias towards the mindset of the "I can't write humourous satire about foreign cultures to save my life" Walrus crowd - sharing the idea that you may have trouble criticizing someone if you're not paying them in the first place. I still have trouble with this "work for free" concept. It certainly explains why their interns might decide they don't have to call in if they're not going to show up. But I digress. The article is, however, universally useful when it continues to drive home the point that there are other things which aren't obvious to everybody,...

Don't you wish you could leave work anytime like American politicians?

Some thoughts on flex-time popped up after seeing a this clip on Videosift with a bunch of American politicians walking out after a grandstanding speech making some spurious claims of support for disgraced Bush administration officials. What amused me about the video was thinking, well, actually, I can do that too. Not so much defend disgraced officials, but make my own hours. Of course, I leave for home either because I'm done work for the day or because I can finish it at home if I need to, and it does eventually gets done - on time. That's the nice thing about working "flexibly", from management's point of view - I get stuff done well and on time. The upside to me is that if we have 30 cm of snow on the way, I can just go home, or stay home for the whole day, spending some time shoveling the snow, and the rest with my laptop getting work done. I've seen things done the wrong way - at least the way I've read Cordie present her situation at PWC: I would argue...

Do you want to write now with a 50% chance of success, or wait until next year and have a better chance?

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...

When IT audits go very wrong: the story of Boeing and SoX

You can count on Francine's site to yield some interesting stories about audit work, and the latest post concerning the audit woes at Boeing is without a doubt the wildest epic of chaos and confusion wrought by a poor SOX job I've really ever seen. The amount of money blown testing controls that had no chance of passing brings to mind a recent post by GeekLawyer bashing his profession, criticizing poor lawyers for spoiling their profession's reputation . A lot of the highlighted points in Francine's article either look outlandishly grim or unintelligible, depending on your familiarity with the world of audit. Deloitte performed the external audit, while Jefferson Wells and PricewaterhouseCoopers did internal audit work for Boeing. Among other reasons to have them present, internal audits can test how your companies controls are working before the external auditors arrive. Since Boeing was paying a lot of money for PwC and JW to send people to test everything - the smart...

Are all the big firms completely wrong about time and money?

Lawyer Christopher Marston will certainly make you ask the question - why are clients billed based on time spent? He has an interesting site and raises some good points. Although he writes in relation to his legal practice, there's some heavy spillover between accounting and legal firms. Both charge clients by the hour, expect to charge a certain amount per hour, and have to deal with the effect from over and under-estimating the amount of time and cost incurred to service clients. On a high level, I see his point that the point of doing a job isn't to work 900 hours and bill at an average rate of $300 an hour, but to say - you need my help, and a fair price for this help is $30,000, because it's worth at least that much - and probably more - to the client, and it allows you to make a profit delivering the service. The interesting thing for staff at any firm like this is the corollary effect: you can eliminate timesheets. Instead, if you work on, say, 5 clients, you tell your...