Since it’s Friday for some of you, we’ll squeeze in a participatory exercise today.
The lucky ones are MIA until Tuesday or farther out. Others of you will not see the outdoors, your homes, or loved ones at all. The rest fall in between. This, all while trying to comply with your firm’s needs. We’d say, “vote early, vote often” but considering some of the attitudes out there, we’re only allowing one vote per person. Feel free to leave your thoughts on the subject in the comments.
Vote, after the jump
Category: Uncategorized
SHOCKER: Joe Francis May Have Attracted Slimy Business People
Joe Francis, perhaps thinking that his strategy to deduct anything related to topless girls might not pan out, is now claiming that he was the victim of three former executives who conspired to embezzle millions of dollars.
“Using shadow companies doing business…the men allegedly filed and then approved phony invoices they wrote themselves. The lawsuit also accuses [one former executive] of filing hundreds of thousands of dollars in false expense reports, for which he reimbursed himself through the company payroll.”
Hard to believe that a pillar of wholesome entertainment like Joe Francis would have attracted people that would take advantage of his lack of knowledge about internal control structures but maybe we don’t know the whole story.
‘Girls Gone Wild’ Founder Accuses CPA of Going Wild [Web CPA]
PCAOB Appears to Be Taking After Big Brother
The SEC has been setting a bad example for everyone. Now the Commission’s sloth-like urgency to appoint a chief accountant seems to have led the PCAOB to think that finding new board members really isn’t a big deal.
Chuck Niemeier announced that he will be leaving his position as a board member of the P very soon, even though his term ended almost a year ago. The PCAOB’s board members are allowed to stay on the board after their terms have ended until a replacement is found.
We suppose that you could give the P credit for having the foresight to write this rule in, as it’s pretty obv that no one really wants this job. Doesn’t make much difference anyway, as it’s not really clear just what the hell they’re doing over there, except making auditors’ lives more difficult and possibly ignoring independence violations.
IFRS Critic to Leave Accounting Firm Regulator [CFO]
The Day the Audits Died
I will refrain from expressing my opinions on the PCAOB and do my best to keep this neutral, I swear.
Accounting Onion pointed out in 2007 that “more than half of the PCAOB’s inspection resources (> $65 million) are protecting the public against the equivalent of a flea bite on the hindquarters of a bull (market),” meaning a bunch of overpaid auditors are inspecting 1% of public company revenue. 1%! What do we need them for?
More, after the jump
And it gets worse. The PCAOB and SEC have decided as of August 13, 2009 that auditors need a whole lot more on their plates including but not limited to increased disclosures for:
• An audit firm withdrawing an audit report
• Any time a firm’s name is used in an unauthorized manner by an issuer without the firm’s consent
• Any time new hires are brought into the firm with a history of disciplinary sanctions
• Anytime professional licenses are revoked, suspended, or subject to conditions or sanctions.
The last one is my personal favorite. Watch your Ps and Qs out there kids, they’re coming for you.
Let’s hope State Boards of Accountancy aren’t as broke as the states they belong to (this means you, California BoA, with your 3 furlough Fridays a month and ELEVEN WEEK WAITING TIME to process CPA exam applications!) otherwise there might be monetary incentive for state licensure authorities to put more bad accountants in the back of their monthly pub just so firms can avoid as many of these reports as possible.
As of October 12, 2009, firms will be required to make these reports to the PCAOB, who will then disseminate the information to the unwashed masses as it sees fit.
The same PCAOB of which Skeptical CPA speaks so highly on June 4, 2009:
Another PCAOB triumph. Does the PCAOB think say KPMG is unaware of problems at Citigroup? Or is the PCAOB aware that it is? How can anyone take the SEC and PCAOB seriously? Is Spokane more fraud plagued than Wall Street? Or just less well connected? Now if Goldman Sachs moved its offices to Spokane …
Check out the article for the backstory.
The SEC is having trouble seducing accountants to its team because of the competitiveness of PCAOB salaries. So what, let them get the scraps? You hear that, soon-to-be-grads? Why are you at Meet the Firms when you could be off getting wined and dined by the PCAOB? Sounds like fun, right?
The Maryland Association of CPAs’ CPA Success made the new reporting requirements sound much tamer, as if it were just a polite, albeit groundbreaking request from the PCAOB.
Perhaps it is a benign request. But this appears to be a PCAOB power grab to me, not to mention a costly one.
Just my $0.02. Do I have to report that to the PCAOB?
Two Obscure Firms Get Together to Form a Slightly Larger Obscure Firm
Call us snobs for being ignorant about regional firms but until our New Firm Name Challenge, we’d never heard of J.H. Cohn and we’ve definitely never heard of Charles Brucia.
Regardless, the two firms are copulating to form a new firm but there won’t be a new name, which is pretty boring. According to Web CPA, “The firm will operate as Charles Brucia & Co., a division of J.H. Cohn.” Vomit.
This current get together follows JHC’s mergers with Frederic Kantor last summer and Good Swartz Brown & Berns last spring.
So at this pace of mergers, we’re predicting JHC will start throwing around “Global 6 Accounting Organization” somewhere around the 24th and one half Century.
J.H. Cohn Combines with Charles Brucia [Web CPA]
If You Know What’s Good for You, Stand Up Right Now
If your employer is of a shrewd nature and didn’t spring for Herman Millers, you need to get off your asses right now! Find out why, after the jump.
And yes, Gmail appears to be down.
Problem of the Day: Boring Repetitive Work Papers
A reader pointed out a problem that plagues many of you in the number crunching universe: writing work papers, emails or other documentation that are incredibly boring and repetitive.
We’ll take that a step further and put it out there that speaking styles among accountants also take on a certain, shall we say, monotony.
More, after the jump
Nearly all accountants’ writing and speaking styles include these words or phrases:
• As such
• Notes
• Pretty straight forward
• Let me know if you have any questions
• Circle back
Clearly, accountants are not English majors. Short of putting a thesaurus on everyone’s desk, we’re not really sure how this can be remedied. Inserting the occasional curse word can add some shock value but this attempt to spice things up may be short-lived depending on your co-workers tolerance for vulgarity.
The list above is obviously not a complete one. Discuss in the comments the most annoying language that you see or hear on a daily basis and if you’ve got suggestions on how to make your day to day interaction more exciting, we’re all ears.
Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Art of the BF
Editor’s Note: Robert Stewart is a former Big 4 auditor and ex-Marine who has since served in several executive management roles in both Internal Audit and Corporate Finance. He is also the founder and chief contributor to online accounting and audit community, The Accounting Nation. Outside of work, he is a husband, father, brother, writer, and woefully inadequate aspiring triathlete. To learn more about The Accounting Nation, go to http://www.accountingnation.com.
Everything in business these days is focused on teams and teamwork. And yet…in the worlds of accounting and finance…and especially in public accounting…the concept of teamwork often feels like such a joke.
More, after the Jump
There always seems to be that one douche bag that stays too late, gets there too early, inflates chargeability, eats hours, works weekends, foregoes vacation, or does some other trick in an attempt to make everyone else look bad and try to the be the superstar of the game. “Semper Fi…fuck the other guy” as the motto goes. And as a result of his selfish actions, causes everyone else to follow suit in order to compete in the marketplace. It raises the bar higher and higher, costing each person their sanity and ruining their long-term job satisfaction and work/life balance.
I like to call that person the buddy fucker, or BF for short. Every group or team has one. And as Dane Cook would say, “if you can’t think of who that person is on your team…then you ARE that person….I know…its funny because it’s true.” It’s so funny…because it’s so true.
If you could somehow get all parties to agree to a common set of working “rules” or standards, then everyone would be happier. But this, my friends, will never happen…and it’s because of a little thing called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The Prisoner’s Dilemma describes a common strategic situation in game theory whereby two or more opponents in a given “game” must make a strategic decision, absent knowledge about what the other party will do, in order to maximize their individual payoff. Both parties inevitably end up choosing an option which results in a less-than-optimal outcome as a result of his or her lack of certainty about what the other party will do.
In other words, rational players (i.e. your fellow employees and staffers…it’s a stretch of a moniker…I realize) will always BF in order to protect their downside. If you make an agreement with your fellow staffers that nobody will work more than 50 hours per week and that one BF breaks ranks and works 60…everybody else looks like a slacker. So everybody protects their downside by working 60 hours…and everybody is worse off as a result of it. This applies to so many things in life and business…just think about the applications…mind boggling. But guess what…It’s just part of the Game…so get used to it…or get out of it. There’s no dignity in complaining. Accept and move on…
The Solution to All Our Fiscal Problems
Leave it to the French. They’ve got the solution to all our fiscal problems. Whether we have the courage to follow their example is another matter.
The solution? Our frog eating friends have decided that they will start taxing people for their stupidity:
More, after the jump
The French Foreign Ministry is proposing a very narrow law requiring citizens foolish enough to wander into international danger zones, regardless of public warnings, to pay at least part of the cost of their own rescue.
For the purposes of our country, we would call for a much wider law that would encompass all kinds of idiotic behavior. For example, Brett Favre deciding to unretire again should be levied something in the neighborhood of 100% of his new salary. If he loves playing football so much, then he’d be thrilled to pay the tax.
The invasion of Iraq kinda goes without saying.
As for state budgets, New York and California’s fiscal crises would have been non-issues had a tax been placed anyone that was elected to those states’ legislative bodies.
Plus, since the amount of stupid behavior is so vast, legions of enforcement personnel would obviously be needed, putting many of you back to work. Pending your passing of an examination of course.
Discuss, in the comments, the appropriate tax levies for your most reviled stupid behavior by your fellow Americans that would solve our budgetary troubles. The existence of this blog/post is duly noted.
Stupidity Tax May Keep Dunces Out of Trouble: Celestine Bohlen [Bloomberg]
Handicapping Firm Failure
God bless the speculative and sensationalist British media. They’ve got no problem wondering aloud about whether accounting firms will be able to survive the backlog of lawsuits out there that amount to billions in damages sought by plaintiffs.
More, after the jump
PwC has already pointed out to everyone that they were not the auditors of King Ponzi’s empire but nobody cares because, the bloody money has to come from somewhere to compensate the victims. Plus, accounting firms have deep pockets and are likely to settle when in a tight spot, using insurance coverage. The problem now is that the suits are so big that insurance coverage may not be enough to keep the partners safe.
We’ve mentioned some of the more prominent lawsuits in our firm watch series of posts if you need to get caught up.
Natch, everyone laments about Andersen when the topic of firm failure comes up as it serves as a template of what can happen when a firm gets in serious trouble:
Andersen’s collapse highlighted the fragility of a global accountancy partnership. As soon as the extent of the fraud was made public, Andersen’s international divisions and partners not involved in the scandal detached themselves from the firm, making it impossible for Andersen to survive.
We’re not really sure what the odds of another Andersen sitch are but you can definitely count on firms continuing to get sued when there’s no one left after company failures and frauds. We’d invite our readers who are partners (or have partner-knowledge) to give us an idea what the feeling is in the current secret society re: the liability risk. Bonus points for former Andersenites’ stories.
We invite the rest of you to handicap the field for chances of failure in the comments. Ours, after giving it very little thought, appear in the tag line.
Billion-dollar lawsuit could destroy top accountancy firms [Telegraph]
Today in IRS Employee Chicanery
Yet another example that should cause the IRS to seriously reconsider its employee screening policy, a now-former IRS compliance officer is looking at jail time after he thought it would be okay to swap a bogus audit report for $1,000 and assistance in finding an apartment.
More, after the jump
Web CPA:
[Fernando] Cruz…told the woman he could “fudge” their tax records so they would have less tax liability. Cruz coached the woman on how to answer questions during an upcoming audit appointment…and instructed her to say that she did not have receipts to verify expenses. Cruz also accepted $500 in cash from the woman and was told that he would receive another $500 if he could make their tax liability go away…the woman met with Cruz at his IRS office as planned, and Cruz prepared an IRS income form with the false information she provided. Cruz also mentioned that the woman might assist him in finding an apartment in exchange for his help to the couple on their audit.
Cruz pleaded guilty to accepting a bribe in exchange for preparing a false tax audit report for a taxpayer. He could also probably be found to be so socially awkward that he needs to be banished from society, since asking for a complete stranger’s help in finding an apartment is just plain weird.
Former IRS Employee Pleads Guilty to Accepting a Bribe [Web CPA]
Guess the Tab: E&Y Edition
Unfortunately our source didn’t know the final tab on this particular fiesta so we’ll put out for you to speculate.
Possibly a Bacardi bottle on the far left and maybe that’s Glenfiddich, second from the left, so we’re not talking top shelf but it’s also not that garbage that gets served out of the well. Plus, the receipt seems far too long for the number of bottle shown. Leave your best guess in the comments.
