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Learning from Mistakes (
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I really do wish the following tutorial was not necessary, but recent events have showed me that our education system has clearly failed us. Now that there is an influx of people with absolutely zero life skills arriving in my neighbourhood, I have, as usual, found it thrust upon my shoulders to deliver a new guide on How to Survive Life. Long-time readers will recall this site's brief master class on business travel . The only thing it lacked to be considered the peer of workplace training was an introductory " You should be able to " Goals section, and a instructions at the conclusion regarding how to get your Continuing Professional Education credits. The new and improved courses delivered by A Counting School address those concerns. How to successfully wait in line at a Polish deli Upon completion of this course, you should able to: know how to stand in line to be served in a Polish deli, and not look like a cursed fool. Lesson one: arrival. Upon arrival, gauge the line...
Every December, about a quarter or a fifth of the UFE writers from the previous September get the bad news - despite their best efforts, they didn't pass the exam. It sucks, but there's no reason to give up. Much advice will then flow forth, and one of the most repeated points - "figure out what went wrong" - will mean more than just asking yourself, "what happened during the three days of the exam?" Equally important, if not moreso, if figuring out what happened before the exam. Speaking very broadly, you have two groups - the people who studied the "right way", and people who studied the "wrong way." Figuring out which group you 'belong' to can help you debrief what went wrong. I'm not really sure what they're trying to warn you about doing with that cable car. If you studied the "right way" - with a study buddy marking your cases, following a well-planned schedule up to the exam, avoiding spending too much or...
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...
Thanks Videosift, you always brighten my day. I'll let you come up with your own story for how this compares to the adventure in AuditLand so many young people go through, hopefully with less claw marks. I nominate Neil to give it a first shot, considering he's now technically in the allegorical doctor's office stage of the video. It's been ages since I posted a video here just for fun, so let's do two while we're at it. This hits the " Learning from Mistakes " category: avoid walking behind horses, especially if you're an idiot.
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...
Tick Marks has an article that's hard to believe - someone hired high school students to work on his audits . His name happened to be Michael Moore, but the guy punished by the SEC wasn't that Moore. Not a big surprise. I've found the grave of Michael Moore in Victoria. No, not that Moore either. Then comes the story which made our jaws drop just a bit when shared with friends: " Accountant ‘treated like a prostitute’ sues City firm for £40 million. " The article states that, while working for PwC, the accountant claimed to be on the receiving end of racist and sexist comments, and she's suing for damages. There's a curious claim in the article that she "claims that the discrimination prevented her becoming a PwC partner earning at least £500,000 a year plus bonuses." I presume that this was phrased more delicately, in the sense that "she could have one day become a partner, had she not been subject to this treatment." Being 31 years old...
The summer of road trip adventures and weddings continues - a week ago sending ACS to a wedding in Waterloo, with a stop on the way at Kitchener's Golden Hearth Baking Company . I've been out there many times for audits, but this weekend had nothing to do with auditing anyone, unless witnessing people get married is a form of auditing. Damnit, this work nevers escapes me. Oh well, at least we make it fun. And delicious, as I explain below. Although the wedding was a fun way to fill up on said deliciousness, it only lasted one night, so I loaded up on some of the wonderful baked goods for Sunday by stopping there on the way. Read a little about them, courtesy of their own website : "They have been at it ever since. The bakery makes everything from scratch including the croissants. They use only the finest quality local and organic ingredients. They do not use preservatives or artificial ingredients. They bake the old fashioned way with butter, fresh milled flour, farm eggs...
Subtle strike commentary? Perhaps I disagree with Post columnist Terence Corcoran when I read much of his work - so much so that I tend to avoid buying or reading the Post to avoid getting a nasty case of "I can't believe you said that, do you have life?" And yet, I can now forgive the last 100 times he's annoyed me after his spot on front page editorial piece in yesterday's Post : While the Mayor goes down in the media and with the public, union leaders chug relatively unscathed through their ritual assaults on taxpayers, good sense and rationality. Mark Ferguson, head of Toronto Local 416 of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, which represents garbage and other outside workers, turned up in a weekend Toronto Star profile as soft-hearted New Wave mystic. He reads works by the Dalai Lama and allegedly seeks to avoid confrontation in favour of fairness. What Mr. Ferguson also reads, however, is the same old union class-warfare texts that have animated union power...
Last week I wrote about a little billing fiasco on my last bill - the week was so busy I didn't end up calling back until today to find out if there was a solution. There in fact was - Telus' IT guys did a good job of quickly repairing the issue which made incoming messages look like they were outgoing if they were from a certain website . I vowed to try and milk this inconvenience for free perks, but the staff I dealt with were friendly and even sympathetic - talking about how they understand this is annoying. As a result, not only did I not feel much in the way of annoyance, I forgot about my grand plan to win additional perks. I still might have remembered to ask if this started to turn into a hassle, but I was quickly transferred from the initial calltaker to an even wiser member of the team who quickly tracked down the correct incident ticket, made sure I would get the correct credit applied to my next bill, and apologized again for their gaffe. So there you have it - anecdotal...
If you're a Telus customer using twitter to get SMS updates, and you don't have an unlimited text messaging plan, get ready for a potentially nasty bill. Although the USA has enjoyed this feature since the dawn of time , for the past few months Canadians weren't able to receive updates from twitter on their cell phones until the Canadian cell phone companies and Twitter sorted things out amongst themselves. Last month Telus caught up to the other major players and reintroduced incoming messages, which was wonderful. There's just one catch - someone screwed up on the code in Telus' billing software, and it started reading incoming messages from twitter as outgoing messages. Ironically I know the people who were behind the unvandalized original version of this ad campaign. Read this painful account on HowardForums if you want to see what happens when you're the first person to get hit by the billing issue . Thank goodness I wasn't the first person to report this...
IwanttobeaCA has a very interesting interview with a retired KPMG partner which features many candid comments on the nature of the Chartered Accountant designation and how things have changed over the years in the profession. It also includes some smart tips for students trying to get hired - talk to the junior staff at recruiting events instead of trying to impress the big shots in attendance. With a small mob of people crowding around the top representatives, they're unlikely to remember you in particular, but the younger people from the firm you're interested in working for not only may have a better chance of remembering you, but you're more likely to make a positive connection with them. And the recruiting teams do ask those younger staff to identify who were the standout candidates. There's one aspect of the interview which I found absolutely troubling, though. It was the nonchalant attitude towards "eating hours". You ate time to meet budgets. And now you're...
I haven't found myself in this position, thank goodness, but there's an article that provides a surprisingly candid look into the world of credit card debt. If you're paying tons of interest and penalties on your original purchases for things you weren't able to afford in the first place, are you in trouble? Yes, but you can lessen the trouble. How? I'll summarize in case you're too lazy to click that link: Haggle. Like. Crazy. Your purchase was a bad idea. Find a way to cope rather than making things worse. The more likely you are to go bankrupt, the more likely the collections agency will be worried about never getting money back from you. Before you start asking for them to cut you some slack and decrease the amount of money you owe them, read the Times article to learn about how they've set themselves up: to guilt you into paying back more money than they even expect you give them! Though the article doesn't explicitly say how this works, it's probably...
In case you're new here, I work as an IT auditor. And she's a "warfighter" in a Washington DC ad who has pretty much nothing to do with today's article. It sounds really sexy when you picture hackers running around performing penetration tests on big fancy computers guarding trade secrets and billions of dollars. And while there's some of that, I can't really write about it - confidentiality, you know. I can, however, give you some free advice that you can use, especially if you're a customer of Bell Sympatico internet access - though this advice is equally useful for people who just bought themselves a new wireless router, or even those studying for the CISA - they expect you to know this sort of thing on the exam. If you are given the choice of WEP or WPA encryption, always pick WPA . Why do I find it so important to write about this? Because despite some relatively clear instructions to enable WPA, it seems like people persist in the practice of "leaving...
I'm shaking my head. You might be shaking your fist too, after reading this , in response to the plan to limit executive pay to a cool half million dollars US as part the American economic bailout plans: “That is pretty draconian — $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus,” said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm. “And you know these companies that are in trouble are not going to pay much of an annual dividend.” Mr. Reda said only a handful of big companies pay chief executives and other senior executives $500,000 or less in total compensation. He said such limits will make it hard for the companies to recruit and keep executives, most of whom could earn more money at other firms. I completely understand his logic. And it fails miserably. If you're experiencing boom times there are still problems with executive compensation, but at least you can try and argue that they're earning...
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...
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