Tag: Facebook

Despite Endless Tweets to the Contrary, Recent Poll Debunks “Accounting Is Boring” Stereotype

Unbeknownst to us (until a little bit ago), Ajilon Finance has declared April as Accountant Appreciation Month and has marked the occasion by encouraging displays of appreciation through the most official of means: Facebook.

And that’s not the all! A recent poll done by Ajilon says that 88% of respondents don’t believe the stereotype that accountants are boring. The same poll found that 84% of the respondents don’t think the profession is boring. These findings contradict a constant Twitter feed so you’ll have to make your own conclusions on the validity of the poll.


In other mind-blowing results from the poll, 98% of those surveyed “recognized that accountants work hard all year round and not only the months during tax season.” The other 2% obviously assume that your 8 month vacation started last Friday.

In other developments, 100% of Big 4 auditors get annoyed when their family, friends, and other non-accountants (like the ones surveyed by Ajilon) ask how their tax season went.

Accountants Can Celebrate: Tax Day is Over & Americans are Seeing the Profession in a New Light [Ajilon Press Release]

Why Aren’t Accountants Getting Fired for Status Updates on Facebook?

A friend of GC recently made mention of the number of people belly aching about busy season in the filterless universe of Facebook. Yes, we realize this is a shock.

Granted, kvetching about your job is a God-given right but at what point is someone just asking to get their ass thrown out? While “experts” are constantly telling you to “be careful about what you post online,” that seems to be overblown because we’re hearing and seeing people hating their jobs out in the open with no discernible repercussions.

God knows there were status updates from E&Y people re: lack of hoops during the Lehman talk.


Case in point, our friend shared this recent status update with us:

“stock options, fraud interviews, preferred equity accounting…my job is sexy.”

Now maybe this isn’t a “get your shit and get the hell out” offense but accountants have proven to be an easily rankled bunch and if the right person were to read this update, there at least might be a frank discussion about this. It’s become obvious that someone at all the major firms is doing nothing but snooping around the Internet, doing nothing but reading employee complaints.

And maybe we’re premature on this issue. Busy season, while winding down, is still going on and warm bodies are still needed, so some gnashing of teeth on FB might be tolerable.

Maybe this is an unwritten rule in the industry that has evolved with the popularity of Facebook. We ignore your rants for all the world to hear, we take pieces of your soul, one busy season at at time.

Accounting News Roundup: Overstock.com Filing 10-K Late; Avoid Tax Related Status Updates on Facebook; IRS Is Getting to Most of Your Calls | 03.17.10

• Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Try to stay sober-ish at lunch today.

• Overstock.com Delays Filing 10-K, Reports Even More GAAP Violations, While Patrick Byrne Hides [White Collar Fraud]
Yesterday marked another SEC deadline that has come and gone, and if you’re one of those teams that has a client filing late, this means that your life is still not yours. Case in point, the KPMG team tasked with turning the ship around at Overstock.com still has some work to do as they filed form 12b-25 yesterday afternoon, notifying the SEC that the 10-K would be a tad late.


“Overstock.com nonchalantly lumped in its latest GAAP violations with other GAAP violations previously disclosed by the company on January 29, rather than separately disclosing them,” writes Sam Antar (emphasis original). Here are the new booboos:

Identification of amounts related to customer refunds and credits not properly included in the Company’s monthly reconciliation of customer refunds and credits to third party statements to determine the completeness and accuracy of returns expense.

The accounting for certain external audit fees on a ratable basis, instead of as incurred.

The recognition of co-branded credit card bounty revenue and promotion expense on an immediate recognition basis, instead of over time.

The late recognition of a reduction in the restructuring accrual for a new sublease and the recognition of interest expense related to the accretion of the restructuring accrual.

The Company reports that the filing will be delayed “until it has completed the restatement process and all procedures necessary,” to get things right. Patrick Byrne is nothing, if not thorough. Oh, and they mentioned that they’ll be reporting material weaknesses in their internal control system but, BUT! that they are still going to report their first annual profit. Shareholders can tepidly rejoice.

• IRS Uses Social Networks for Tax Probes [Web CPA]
The IRS has decided that the best way to discover your tax dodging ways is to look for clues in the one place no one can resist being completely and uncomfortably honest: Facebook.

Web CPA reports, “The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released documents uncovered from Freedom of Information Act requests, showing that the IRS as well as the FBI and other government agencies have been using social media sites like Facebook to collect information for investigations.”

Right. We suggest you stop talking about the six-figure 1099 you got that didn’t have any withholding and that you didn’t bother making estimated tax payments. Or roll the dice, lock up your privacy settings and continue with the financial TMI. Your choice.

• TIGTA: IRS on Track to Meet Goal of Answering 71% of Taxpayer Phone Calls After a 12-Minute Wait [TaxProf Blog]
The IRS is making good on its promise to ignore less than 30% of the phone calls from taxpayers needing help with their 2009 tax returns. They’re also getting to each caller in less than twelve minutes which is pretty good considering all the shit they’re putting up with these days (planes, packages full of personal items that might be a something, people having seizures, overzealous agents). If you’ve got an extra twelve minutes, call them up and thank them for their service.

CPAs Friending Potential Clients? Only Time Will Tell

Earlier this week I caught a link from @CPA_Trendlines about the “next generation” accounting firm. The article spotlighted Blumer & Associates, a second-generation firm in South Carolina trying to find its niche in tomorrow’s market. With an eyebrow raised, I continued reading:

Blumer’s “new management” theories, for example, mean a ruthlessly honest kind of client focus, including three essential hallmarks:

• a sharply defined niche focus,
• a “clean” client list and
• innovation “to create new services as awareness of client needs grows.”

Sure, this theory is great if your firm consists of fewer people than most Big 4 engagement teams, but I nonetheless nod in recognition and approval to the idea of change. It would be hard, however, to apply these thought practices to today’s large firms.


Just for kicks:

Niche focus – You mean spreading thin across every crevice of market opportunity, right?

Clean client list – Oops. Oops again.

Innovation – Slow moving giants are just that. Slow.

Lost in the article’s comments was commentary from management consultant Rita Keller commending Blumer’s challenge to the “one size fits all” approach: “[T]he next generation of leaders will create organizations that are more nimble and open to continual change and new ideas. They will not get new clients at a Chamber networking event, they’ll get them from Facebook and from blogging. They will keep in touch with referral sources on-line, not at lunch.”

Don’t scoff; this might very well be true. The long-term advantages of networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are nothing more than “what-if” conversation bits better suited for the Twitterverse and blogs like this place. But think about it – Millennial’s are connected to hundreds if not thousands of people on Facebook.

These networks started in high school or college and will only grow organically as their careers expand and evolve. Friends and colleagues will move on from public accounting, and their new careers will be accessible via newsfeeds and status updates. Facebooking stalking will have a new (and potentially profitable) purpose.

Will shaking hands on the back nine be replaced by wall posts? Probably not, but the Rolodex is becoming irrelevant right in front of our eyes. Why pick up the phone when a brief Facebook message or direct message Tweet will suffice? Boomers can object all they want, but person-to-person interaction is well on its way out of fashion.

Just don’t go poking that potential client; at least not right away.

A Little Housekeeping

Your cubicle isn’t the only place it’s busy season. We’ve been working hard to make your GoingConcern experience as streamlined as an ez401K, an effort we revealed today with a move to the popular Wordpress platform from our old Movable Type framework, a few design changes, a brand new comment system, and — yes, we admit — even a bit of downtime!

We realize that change can be scary, but we encourage you to tell us what you think in our new, more flexible comment system, which will allow you to sign in with your Twitter, Facebook, or OpenID accounts and make your voice heard loud and clear across the internet. We encourage you to give it a go — and of course sign up to follow GoingConcern on Twitter, become one of our fans on Facebook, or sign up for our e-mail newsletter.

On top of that, the choir of voices harmonizing on GoingConcern will be growing. You’ll be getting more frequent posts from the likes of The JDA and Francine; plus, we’re teaming with the gang at CFOZone for more corporate finance insight and analysis.

We’ll also be looking to interview more of you, dear readers, to hear more about what’s on your mind. If you or someone you know will make a good subject, or if you just want to play editorial director and let us know what we should be covering, just drop us an email at tips@goingconcern.com.

Is Patrick Byrne’s Facebook Friends List Motivated by a Farmville Obsession?

Thumbnail image for farmvillePat.jpgWe haven’t really touched on the Patrick Byrne’s ill-fated attempt to stalk his critics (and all their friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers) mostly because we weren’t on the list and those that were (including Gary Weiss, Sam Antar, Joe Wiesenthal, and Barry Ritholtz) are doing a fine job of pointing out how desperate, shady, and just plain fucking bad this makes Patsy, his head minion at DeepCapture Judd Bagley, and Overstock look.
We only bring it up now because we’d like to point out that it’s worth speculating on the other side of this story. Our contention is that P. Byrne, being of questionable mind and maturity, is OBSESSED with Farmville and it is his personal mission to destroy the Farmvilles of his critics and their FB friends (now who’s movin’ up in Farmville, bitches?).
This agonizing torture method will eventually wear down the haters to the point to where no one will be able to take the man, his doomed-to-fail quest to locate an auditor, and his company seriously and will thus give up their quest of destroying him.
The only other thing we can come up with is that he has an intense hatred of trite status updates and was going to expose everyone for their lack of substantive commentary but we find all his critics to be interesting bloggers, so we tossed that theory.
Grant Thornton and PwC have got to feel pret-tay good about how this all turned out. If you’ve got you own theories or thoughts on this situation, feel free to discuss them here.

Deloitte Is Super Proud of Their Presence on Linked In

Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for DTa.jpgOh, and they finally released their global revenue numbers.

Deloitte ended the suspense today, issuing their global revenues for fiscal year 2009 and issuing their “annual review”. For the past couple of months, we were speculating about the holdup since they have historically been issued much earlier.


Most of the comments at that time were taking the under on the revenues and they were right, as Deloitte came in at $26.1 billion. This was down 4.9% but the firm kindly reminds everyone that in local currency, there was actually growth of 1%, thankyouverymuch.

This, despite all the charts on Deloitte’s website showing the drop of 4.9%. Jim Quigley, Global CEO, and going with the local currency figures:

“Achieving positive growth in this exceptionally difficult economic environment was the result of close attention to the needs of clients and a strong commitment to professional excellence by our member firm professionals. Despite the tough economy, we remain focused on our vision to be the standard of excellence and will continue to invest in pursuit of this vision”

In addition to JQ’s assessment, an explanation of revenues by functional area continue to refer to growth while the chart shows decreases in revenues when compared to the prior fiscal year:

Consulting was the fastest growing function at 7.3 percent. Reflecting the challenging economy, both audit and tax were relatively flat against the prior year. Financial advisory services decreased by 6.1 percent from the prior year, primarily due to substantially decreased merger and acquisition activity.

On the chart, consulting was shown to only grow 2%, tax decreased by 5.5%, audit by 6.4%, and financial advisory by 13.8%. So, yeah, a little confusing. Not to mention that all of the charts present this information in what appears to be Enron Beezlebub.

Deloitte presents a whole bunch of additional information that is much larger, including how awesome the firm’s social network presence is:

• Over 75,000 members on Linked In
• Over 11,000 fans of their Facebook page
• Over 2,000 followers on their Twitter feed

And since they knew you were wondering, Deloitte uses 2.59 MWh of electricity per person, which amounts to carbon emissions of 1.31 Mt CO2 per person. Again, since this information is in much larger font, we’ll go out on a limb and assume that it positive news.

Seems like the typical spin, so we’ll take it for what it’s worth. Discuss your thoughts on Deloitte’s numbers and what it’s Facebook status might be in the comments.

Facebook Finds a CFO, Hopefully One that is Okay with Awkward Interaction

Facebook Inc. announced today that David Ebersman will be the company’s Chief Financial Officer:

Ebersman, 39, will oversee Facebook’s finance, accounting, investor relations and real estate functions. He will formally start in September, Palo Alto, California-based Facebook said in a statement today.

You’ll note that Ebersman will oversee “investor relations”. It’s probably no coincidence that this is not a task that falls on Mark Zuckerberg who “has been known to have awkward interactions with other humans”:http://valleywag.gawker.com/344440/60-minutes-scoop-zuckerberg-remains-awkward-with-humans.
Thus, another challenge that will face Ebersman in his new position will be actually interacting with his boss. We here at Going Concern predict that awkward encounters with Zuckerberg will definitely be the biggest unforeseen challenge that Ebersman will wrestle with.
The article does not elaborate on whether Ebersman’s status updates on the social networking site are trite observations about the weather, his busy weekend, or a bad day at work.
“
Facebook Names Former Genentech Manager Ebersman Finance Chief”:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a1vS1Ub87oSA [Bloomberg]