At least that’s what we’re guessing.
Bloomberg:
“EBay Inc., owner of the most visited U.S. e-commerce Web site, reported second-quarter profit that beat analysts’ estimates, a sign that Chief Executive Officer John Donahoe’s turnaround efforts are working.”
Whatevs. We’d argue beauties like this are the reason for the good Q.
EBay Profit Beats Estimates in Sign That Turnaround Is Working [Bloomberg]
Category: Uncategorized
Letter from the Editor – Welcome to Going Concern
Working in accounting or finance has a certain stigma associated with it. More times than not, when someone asks you the ubiquitous getting-to-know-you-at-a-party question, “What do you do?” and your response is, “I’m an [enter accounting/finance related position here]” the reaction is typically in some form of pity.
Whether it’s a look that says, “bor–ing” or the inquisitor having to go through your painful explanation of what it is you actually do, it’s rarely a gr��������������������n.
Unless you embrace the stigma of boring, nerdy, introverts that are constantly swimming in spreadsheets, and delve into some self-depreciating humor, bitterness and ranting.
That’s what Going Concern is all about. We’ve embraced everything that makes accounting and finance so painfully dull and we’re going to turn it on its green eyeshade-wearing head.
We’re going to mock, maim, gossip, chastise, rant, and yes, maybe a little advocating, of everything associated with crunching numbers. We will bring you all the latest happenings around the world of the largest and well known firms and our analysis will be anything but accountant-like.
Check out our reoccurring features after the jump
Here are some regular features we will have (and definitely check out our archives):
Tchotchke Contests – Accounting firms love to hand out tchotchkes. There doesn’t seem to be any discernable reason for it but inevitably, your cubicle ends up filled with stress balls, Rubik’s cubes, umbrellas, etc. Some of this stuff handed out is a downright mind job. We want you to send us pictures of your strangest firm schwag.
Guess What I Got Asked to Do Today? – Every number-cruncher, at some point in their career, has asked themselves, “What did he/she just ask me to do?” Whether it’s picking up late-night dinner, footing the phonebook, or cleaning out a closet, we want your stories. The bad, the demoralizing, the thing that made you flip out.
Guess What My Intern Did? – Because having your first job or internship can be nerve racking, staff and interns sometimes do hilarious things unwittingly. Did they run out of gas picking up dinner? Shred workpapers that were signed off on by a partner? Come in hung over and puke on the client’s super-secret, there’s-only-one-copy-of-these files? We know you have these stories and you know you want to share them.
Stupid Auditor Questions – Don’t worry non-public accountants, you won’t be left behind on Going Concern. We know you have to deal with auditors. We know that auditors ask stupid questions. We want to hear what those stupid questions are. Don’t hold back, we know you want to cut loose. This is the place to do it.
What Job Would You Rather Have? – It’s 10 pm, you’re sitting in your beige cubicle, staring at a spreadsheet that has thousands of rows that are starting to blend together and you think to yourself, “How did I get here? Should I be doing something else? Anything other than this?” We feel your pain. Tell us what you would rather be doing. Picking up elephant dung? Window-washer? Artificially inseminating farm animals? Tell us your dreams of what you would rather be doing than working with Excel.
This is just the beginning but we need your help. We need your gossip, rumors, and story ideas for what you want this blog to be, because it’s for you, our loyal Going Concern readers. Send all tips via email to tips@goingconcern.com. We’ll always keep you anonymous unless you want to be named and if you want to tell us something off the record, that’s cool too, just let us know.
Now get back to your spreadsheets!
Trying to Decipher the Awkward and Scattered Sex Lives of Accountants
The blog Energized Accounting asks if accountants make better lovers. Now before you all squawking about how you’re an animal in the sack, let’s try to be realistic about this question.
First of all, this makes the assumption that accountants are getting laid in the first place. This is mostly farcical for a couple reasons: A) Lots of accountants have to choose between sleeping and eating already because of the hours they work. You throw in boot-knocking and some excel wizards are going to start starving to death; and 2) Unofficial statistics have shown that seven out ten accountants have no game. You may not know who you are but your friends do.
So based on that, 30% of you are getting some action. And since there is a rampant proclivity to date co-workers (which we will exclude for this exercise) among accountants that narrows it down to about 5% of accountants having sex with non-bean counters. As we mentioned, you’re working most of the time so where the hell is this hot sex happening? We’re thinking that national training sessions might be one spot, where you’re picking up prosties or random hot townies in whatever strange city you happen to land in? Accountants treat national training like Vegas so pretty much anything goes but what about the other 51 weeks in the year? Is that what is going on at those two hour lunches? Do some client locations have rooms set up for this like a swing-joint? Try to enlighten us without making a scene.
Guess What My Intern Did?
A commenter read our minds with regard to talking about interns, God bless ’em.
So today, in the spirit of the intern-season, we’re launching the first edition of “Guess What My Intern Did?” because sometimes they can do stupid things and we want to hear about it.
Examples could possibly include: any kind of shameless, awkward sexual advances on superiors; asking he/she to get a copy of an email from the asshole CFO; showing up to work hung over smelling like Ken Lewis; You get the idea.
Survey: No Confidence in Mark-to-Market
This may come as shock to some of you but mark-to-market accounting is unpopular. And when we say unpopular, we don’t mean your nerdy brother-unpopular, we’re talking George W. Bush-unpopular. Now before you go apeshit about “reality” and “economic cycles” will share some results with you from a survey provided by Valuation Research Corporation and then you can engage in your the steel-cage death dork match.
• According to the survey, 58% of respondents believe that market turmoil negates Fair Value Accounting’s validity
• Those who believed FVA was flawed and potentially not valid during market turmoil, almost 34% suggested a temporary return to historical cost accounting as an alternative
• Regarding Level 3 Assets: A full 44% believed the bank values were within an accuracy of 10% and another 40% thought those values were as much as 30% off.
• Regarding Level 3 Assets: Thirty-six percent believed hedge fund and private equity values were only within an accuracy of 10% and a full 49% thought those values were as much as 30% off.
• Respondents were split when asked if mark-to-market should be suspended for the purposes of bank regulatory capital with 50% believing it should be and 50% believing it should not be.
So the take away seems to be that MTM doesn’t work and is pretty much not legit when the shit hits the fan, everyone trying to value Level 3 assets is using a dartboard, and nobody knows how to fix the problem.
Definitely interesting results but if anyone says, “Barney Frank knew what he was talking about”, projectile vomiting is going ensue.
Survey – No Confidence in Fair Value.pdf
BDO ‘Invites’ Partners to Retire in the UK
BDO in the UK has “‘invited’ 24 partners to take retirement and is in the process of settling the details over the withdrawal of equity”, according to Accountancy Age. And by “invited”, we’re pretty sure BDO means, “pack your shit”.
According to Simon Michaels, the head honcho in the UK, the “withdrawal of equity” would not be an “unmanageable situation to deal with” which is sorta like saying “it’ll hurt for a little while but as soon as my ownership is bigger, I’ll be over it.”
This whole sitch across the pond compelled us to call a BDO rep here in the States to find out what might be going down for the American partners. We were told that there were no plans for dismissal of partners in U.S. and in fact, partners will likely to continue to be added to the firm. This jogged our hazy memory about our speculation that BDO was adding some partners last month in order to spread out some liability.
So it appears that since BDO International Global Coordination isn’t on the hook for the half a billion in liability from the Banco Espirito case, they can’t afford to keep all their partners. BDO in States, on the other hand, needs to spread out the love on the liability. Don’t you love it when everything makes sense?
Reality bites for BDO Stoy Hayward [Accountancy Age]
McGladrey & Pullen Doesn’t Love H&R Block Anymore
We’re deeply saddened to learn that McGladrey & Pullen and H&R Block are splitting up:
“This arrangement made sense in 1999,” said Dave Scudder, managing partner of McGladrey & Pullen LLP. “However, that operational and financial model does not serve us well as we address our future goals of client service, opportunity for our partners, and continued growth.”
Translation: It’s about the money.
“We are taking this action because we believe it to be in the best interests of our partners, our employees and our clients. We see great opportunities for success and growth for McGladrey & Pullen as a traditionally structured firm able to provide full service across all industry segments,” Scudder noted.
M&P also wanted you all to know that it’s not your fault, that they still love you but sometimes firms fall out of love.
McGladrey & Pullen News Release
Forbes: Senior Accountants Pay Rising in the Recession
Feel free to call bullshit on this because we’ve heard rumors about pay freezes at KPMG (they are getting back to us on this) but according to Forbes, senior accountants rank at #11 for “Hot Jobs Where Pay is Rising” in the recession. The list states median pay at $60,300. Not only that but apparently, there aren’t enough of you senior accountants:
There’s a shortage of senior accountants right now, and the recession has actually provided a chance for them to revive client relationships, believes Mark Koziel, senior manager of firm practice management at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. “As long as there’s small-business America, as long as there’s big-business America, there will still be a need to do auditing and tax returns,” he says.
This strikes us as strange as there have been layoffs at several firms. The need for auditing and is obvious but those of you left are probably doing the work of two or three people.
UPDATE, July 22, 2009: KPMG got back to us re: pay freezes and had no comment
Paulson’s Threatening of Ken Lewis Gets the Barney Frank Stamp of Approval
Barney Frank is stumped. Trying to figure out why Maxine Waters is MIA is one thing, but picking the evil mastermind behind the shakedown of Ken Lewis is a completely different enigma.
Even if Paulson ordered the code red, the Sass from Mass is pretty sure that was the right thing to do because we need guys like HP on that wall. When you’ve got the imminent financial apocalypse knocking at your door, threatening a bank CEO of questionable sobriety cannot be handled by someone of meekness and mild temperament (ahem, B-squared).
Hank Paulson did before and he’d do it again. He’d just rather you said “thank you” and went on your way.
Frank Says No “Villain” in Bank of America-Merrill Lynch Deal [Bloomberg]
What Say You? Are Early Promotions a Crock?
It’s about the time of year where the Big 4 start announcing promotions and with promotions come the inevitable debate about who got promoted, who didn’t, hating on some, congratulating others, and ugly debates over those that were promoted early.
Early or skip promotions are never short on controversy. As one source put it “[early promotions] are completely arbitrary and situational, merit generally doesn’t play into it”.
The claim will often be made that someone needs to fill an empty role on a team. Sometimes it is a purely bullshit political situation and there have even been cases where older associates are promoted early based on their age and other work experience regardless of their performance with the current firm.
In one case, another source told us about an associate that was promoted to manager in three years (i.e. promoted early twice) but it was pretty clear to the most of team (i.e. staff) that the person was hardly ready for the pressures and responsibilities of being a manager.
The other side of this debate are the professionals that are actually performing at a high enough level to warrant the early promotion (no, really). Granted the situation has to arise where the individual has the opportunity to take on greater responsibility and thus proves him or herself but if someone does step up (read: working 24/7) to the plate on several occasions, maybe the promotion is warranted.
Because of the hierarchal nature of accounting firms, this may not even be an issue in your office but it does happen with freakish regularity at other offices. Let’s us know what your office has done in the past and what is going on this summer now that were in swing of promotion season. Feel free to discuss in the comments or email us your inside info to tips@goingconcern.com.
Lehman Working to Pay Off Debt, One Tchotchke at a Time
In a couple months it will be at the one year anniversary of the collapse Lehman Brothers. In order to catch you up on the firm’s progess in paying off the $250 billion in debt owed to creditors, we proudly present The Lehman Store, courtesy of eBay.
So far the Lehman Store has 100% positive feedback with comments such as: “Great Lehman tie and excellent delivery time.” and “A+ SELLER”.
Lehman couldn’t be more pleased, “‘We are really excited to be able to offer this to the public because there is a demand,’ said Lehman spokeswoman Kimberly Macleod in a telephone interview.”
“There is a demand“, people. And since there are currently 66 items on the auction block, you’d better get on this, PRONTO.
Lehman Holds EBay Garage Sale, Hawking Trinkets to Pay Off Debt [Bloomberg]
Madoff Already has Respect in Prison and He Hasn’t Even Gotten Started
Whenever you’re the new guy, things can be awkward for awhile. Not for Bernie Madoff. The Master de Ponz has been in prison for less than a month and the guy is thriving already:
Some of his fellow inmates, in fact, respect him for being a stand-up guy who pleaded guilty without implicating any of the other people strongly suspected of helping him pull off the fraud that swindled more than 1,000 people out of more than $65 billion over two decades. “He got a lot of respect from other inmates because he didn’t tell on anybody, he didn’t take everybody down with him,” the source said.
That’s right people, RESPECT.
The Post, never short on the melodramatic, is focusing on the inmates that are looking to slap around ole Bern to get themselves a little respect. We don’t buy it. Anyone looking to rough him up will have a change of heart as soon as they hear about the outstanding year over year double-digit returns he’ll get you on those Lucky Strikes.
UPDATE, 3:37 PM: A guy sometimes gets a little distracted from personal appearance when he’s being trucked around. Check out DealBreaker for Bess Levin’s take on Butner’s new Mr. Popular.
BERNIE IN THUGS’ SIGHTS [New York Post]