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The party bus at Bay and King: wheeled debacle or the most brilliant application of motor coaches ever? As much as I'd like to think I'm just making jokes concerning the amount of travel auditors often experience, Mark Lee has brought our attention to a perhaps long overdue concept: AllABoardroom , a portable meeting room now available in the UK for the truly dedicated road warriors. It all makes me keep thinking back to a certain movie's caravan camp; with St. Patrick's Day upon us, perhaps Irish Travelers of the Business World may be a more apt term for the denizens of Audit Land. Regardless, now you can now book a tour bus for rockstar accountants . How much does it rock? It has an onboard fireplace. And, naturally, a bar. Interestingly, the fee for drinks is donated to charity. Whether this is done purely to be charitable or to make compliance with British liquor laws easier - are there really any laws regarding liquor in the UK, anyway? - is perhaps a moot point but...
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...
This image pretty much summarizes the last two or three weeks. It's been a wild a joyful blur. Between supervising ICAO low-income tax clinics, hitting multiple deadlines with aplomb and celebrating Canada's Gold, there's barely enough time to go skiing. Last chance for me is likely today. The one big downside I have to admit is that it's not exactly easy to just disappear in the middle of the week to go replicate the feats of snow sports excellence we got to enjoy last month. Unless you plan for a winter vacation. Maybe next year. When I see a car perfectly painted the colours of our great land, I wonder, "did they specifically pick those colours knowing one day they'd be parading up and down Yonge St. after a stunningly perfect Canadian hockey victory?"
Congratulations to Alexandre Bilodeau for bringing a glorious golden victory to Canada's western shores! In tribute to his spectacular mogul run, I offer some Big 4 snow sport action. The snow profile above, sadly, is a little too similar to that in Vancouver this month. Who would've expected mild weather in February - aside from anyone who's ever visited or moved to B.C. for that very reason? Alexandre's victory reminded me the fall recruiting season - yes I'm going there - where two of the Big Four firms trumpeted their involvement with the Winter Games. But before we get into who's doing what on an official level, let's see what's going on from Google's point of view, searching for "FIRMNAME" and "Vancouver Olympics: PwC: they're running a study to figure out whether or not the Olympics end up breaking even or perhaps even generating a profit for the hosts. How very stereotypical for accountants, I know. KPMG: a profile on Executive...
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...
There's actually a rule on how to treat "stolen property" on your US tax return: " Stolen property. If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless in the same year, you return it to its rightful owner." Someone reported a robbery? As usual, I remind you that I'm not offering you any tax advice here - hire a professional if you need any of that. Of course, I don't think the target audience for this bit of tax law would even care about my disclaimer - they probably have other issues they should instead be dealing with. What makes this funnier is seeing this featured on Failblog, although I stumbled upon it courtesy CPASuccess - thank guys, that's just epic. Possibly be an epic win rather than a fail depending on how you look at it, though. I was going to say "I don't have the US tax code on hand to verify if this is in fact real," when I first saw it on their blog, but then I skipped...
One of the many fun things about travelling around the world is finding out the rather different way people do common tasks. Surprises abound, even with something as prosaic as saying "Back in 5 Minutes." At least, that's what I assume this meant in a Chinese mall. Similarly, the sales staff embrace different sales tactics, particularly depending on where you find yourself. There were three examples which stood out. Hard ball haggling At most markets and stores were haggling can happen, it's traditional for salespeople to lower their last price if you're walking away after a bit of haggling. How odd to have the staff who will play hardball. You try and get a better price, but they don't want to budge. So you leave - and they call after you twice, each time saying, "no, I'm not lowering the price any lower." Sure, well thanks. Your sales pitch adds nothing to the conversation, bye. You walk away a third time only to get called again. "Ok, fine...
Completely random promotion: check out My Life is Polish - the site is hilarious, particularly if you are of Polish descent. If you're not, I recommend keeping a bookmark to Google Translate's Polish to English engine to get some of the jokes painfully true stories. Example: Today, my mom poured water into our shampoo bottle and said "no to wystarczy do konca tygodnia". MLIP " The "punchline", automatically translated by Google is " no it is sufficient to the end of the week ". Close, Google, but the correct translation would be "now it will last until the end of the week." You get the idea regardless, but I submitted a correction to Google anyway. It'll be interesting to see if they fix it down the road. Some work even if you don't speak the language though: " Today, I realized that all of my closest friends have been forced to memorize at least 3 words in polish. By me. I quiz them every couple of weeks and get angry when...
If you're working with well-connected people you may have seen this already. I've received multiple copies: it's been uploaded to one site specializing on the topic and it was also shared by Life of an Auditor . the latter being the first to publish it, on August 31, 2009. Forwarded copies, rather than those found on websites, interestingly enough, always feature a different chain of "Big Four plus More" e-mail addresses, identifying scores of people who were CC'd, and a silent mass of BCC'd people whose privacy is left intact. What is this artefact? A simple farewell. A farewell to an office from someone who wanted to let it all out. Whether this was only shared with close friends as an inside joke or was a nasty bomb can best be answered by going to the source - but we won't start a hunt right now. Getting these e-mails is in some ways, a rite of passage - as denizens of AuditLand receive an Epic forward, they spread it virally - just like a chain letter...
An example of "what's it like to be a senior staff" writing seems in order, after all the drama of the nasty early fall combined recruiting, layoff and UFE exam analysis season. The thought of explaining what it's like to run jobs with eager young staff ready to assist you came about, ironically, after noticing that Stuff Accountants Like , an unashamed homage to the inventor of the online genre, Stuff White People Like , announced their site is going on an LOA , an extended vacation - I found it amusing that my search for the SWPL link led me to their article about taking a year off - so "unashamed homage" is not too subtle a term here. SAL explained that the work involved in writing new posts has taken its toll and a busy season is no doubt about to smack the author in the face. My own busy season is in unabashed full swing - now that I've been working in as a CA firm for a few years I have the joy of being trusted to Get Things Done, while at the same...
If you stay up late to finish work, you may just get it done. But at what price? You turn into some sort of 24 hour automaton. Remember how to stop and relax, then do it. One of the things I enjoy about my job is the flexible work schedule. Coming from a student journalism background, I'm well versed in the joy and pain of pulling an all-nighter to get things done once in a while. The risk, of course, is that you'll wake up. Sort of. You'll be groggy, and you'll hit snooze and pass out for another hour. And whoever tried to wake you up will hear you muttering about what you were doing when you were awake. Like searching for super users in the application you were testing. I wouldn't have thought of sharing this thought, since it's not all that interesting to me, except for the pure comedy of finding out you were spewing out jargon while asleep, until I read Dennis' points about the joys of blogging about the German ERP . And you'll know you had to be babbling...
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...
Word has reached me that on day one of the 2009 UFE , one writer, presumably in Quebec, had enough - and left the room after about an hour into the "comp" - the 5 hour comprehensive first day case of the three day exam. I know of no other facts aside from the fact that it presumably looks like someone cracked under the stress of the, in total, thirteen hour exam. If you're new here, I'm talking about the Uniform Final Evaulation - the Canadian Chartered Accountants' final professional exam, not some fitness competition . Although there's definitely some sort of mental fitness you need to possess to survive the exam's sick game. Stress management takes many forms of awesome. Pictured: a relaxed survivor Hopefully everyone who wrote the exam and who cares so much about it that they're reading the entries here passed. You'd have to ace the second two days exams' to have a chance at passing if you ran out of the first day's exam. And unless there's...
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 over seven hours away from home right now, ready to start another exciting audit tomorrow. Arriving about an hour before the hotel retaurant was due to close, I thought I was in luck - I could just wander downstairs and get something delicious. Visions of delicious baked goods danced before me, but it was not to be. In a small town on a Sunday night many places are likely to close early. Even in Toronto my local deli will usually shut its doors a good half hour before closing time if it's completely dead. I can't blame them - it's a smart decisions to send your staff home early if keeping them around will cost more than they'll give you in revenue. And so it's almost cruel to find a delicious looking site like The Cooking Accountant on a night like this. Almost cruel, because there fortunately are a few places open that cater to late night arrivals, so I didn't have to subsist on chips and rice krispie squares for dinner. The Cooking Accountant has an awesome...
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