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Learning from Mistakes (
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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...
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...
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,...
Unfortunately you won't learn how to pass most exams with this knowledge, but applying the rules or tips in Dave Pollard's "When not to use e-mail" posting will make you a much better communicator. This list applies to all people, but there are specific insights for auditors. Especially when you're starting out, and you find yourself thinking, "this is great, I can just e-mail everything and wait for answers to come back." Although it can, funnily enough, often work in spite of Pollard's list, it's important to know how this can and will fail. Above: there are media other than e-mail which you can use for communication, more successfully too Remember, that time is precious, and e-mail can unfortunately waste it. Consider these two 'rules'. 3. When you are seeking information that is not simple and straight-forward 4. When you're sending a few people complicated instructions The rules are tightly linked - the more confusing something gets...
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...
Easy answer. This one. My first response to his associated related "Recruit Genie" site was "BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA" coupled with, "was this designed by a 12 year old with too much time on his hands?" "Strange as it may seem, employees don't have many free speech rights, especially when it comes to making negative, public comments about their current employer. That's just fine with us..." No. No. Stop. Which former Soviet Republic did you grow up in? How many cold winters did you experience in Siberia? Yes, badmouthing your boss is not something that's a Good Idea, but coming out like the all-knowing Oracle with your own commentary is worse than amateur. It looks like the sit is really a Borat DVD easter egg or something similar. It gets funnier, though. This is worse than the sales pitches I attempted for my college newspaper back in the day: Job posts are always free, but you can enhance your presence and your recruitment brand with an inexpensive...
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...
The ones supplied with the iPod Nano I scored this year survived a surprise visit to the laundry . The sound is also much cleaner now.
I'm about to learn something the infamous ‘fun way’. It all started when I wondered where my arbutus were. I couldn’t find them on my desk, so perhaps they were in my bag at work. I went to the office, looked inside the pockets, and still couldn’t find them. I was puzzled but resigned to the fact that they would eventually show up. Somewhere. While wandering over to put my laundry in the drier the mystery solved itself, and I solved the mystery rather inadvertently - and promptly kicked myself for forgetting to check my shirt pockets for items like headphones before putting them in the washer in the first place. So now I’m following the Standard Protocol, which is to say, I’m going to give the arbutus a day or so to dry off. If they do end up working after my fit of brainlessness I’ll promptly issue my announcement on how waterproof the standard arbutus issued with an iPod Nano - whatever they call the mid-2007 edition - actually are.
The team behind Bioshock caught a lot of flack for releasing a sub-par disc masquerading as a soundtrack for buyers of the game's Limited Edition in the UK. It was a mere three tracks, all remixes by Moby. What a disappointment if you paid extra for that. Fortunately, I never did. In a doubly awesome twist, 2K made up for it by releasing the entire soundtrack to the game's original in-game audio . Click here for a direct download . There's a cool story with the soundtrack composer at Music 4 Games . The game is set in the 60's and as such, includes a slew of licensed songs which - there's a discussion on the developer forums where some hardcore fans have figured out how to extract said songs. Yay again to Rock, Paper, Shotgun for tipping me off to the existence of all these goodies - it's one of my new favourite sites.
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...
CD keys are the string of letters and digits that many programs use to 'unlock' the program so you can use them. It's a relatively simple anti-piracy measure which will drive you completely mad if you ever need to reinstall a program and find that your CD key is not physically present with your actual CD. After digging through a bunch of messy drawers, which I subsequently emptied - part of a long overdue late spring cleaning - I finally found the CD key I was looking for. To avoid going mad in the future, I have two tactics. First, clean up the mess so things will be more organized. But, more importantly, write up the list of CD keys in my possession so if I do lose the key again, I'll have it written down somewhere. I can't believe I didn't think of doing this sooner. Hopefully this extremely simple idea will help at least one other person.
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...
It turns out some medics rushing to treat someone at a nightclub noticed a car filling with smoke, Time reports. Savvy bomb-makers know to use cars with tinted windows, I suppose. Seriously - I've seen one photo of the car so far, and you can clearly see from the rear passenger window through the rear window. No tint. It'd be a stretch to think that this stroke of luck would lead government officials to ban all tinted windows in a vain hope for a repeat of this luck. But then again, they banned nail clippers from airplanes. Ridiculous. At least there's a new argument to use on co-workers who believe coming to work in the downtown core is somehow dangerous: some recently arrested plotters were recorded saying that they were justifying their attacks on nightclubs by arguing that they're dens of vice and immorality, therefore they 'deserve it', according to their twisted logic. So clubbing is more dangerous now, terrorism-wise, then going to work. How oddly reassuring...
Michael Moore's new movie Sicko deals with the complete disaster known as the USA's health care . Giving your money to companies with a vested interest in keeping it and then hoping they'll pay you back when you need it to pay for a condition that they reserve the right to diagnose is, at best, an exercise in optimism - that is, being so optimistic that you believe that corporations will do what's Right rather than what's Super Profitable. With that brief summary of Moore's entire opus in mind - it's a Really Good Film - I wondered what the immediate effect would be. After all, the movie's a call to arms, to go ahead and do something to make things better for the United States. Some of the film's most powerful scenes came from his trips abroad. He crossed the river to see how we do things in Canada, jumped the pond to check out England and France, and paid a very moving visit to Cuba. And that's what it's going to come to, it seems. Medical tourism...
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