A good boss is hard to find

In today’s society, every worker competes and pays a dear price just for the opportunity to work in a good company. Yet it seems more and more difficult to come across decent bosses.

Not long ago I was working as an assistant accountant in a company for a particular boss who had a habit of scrutinising staff. I was the new girl, so naturally I became her prime target. Soon I had to fill in timesheets every day to show that I actually worked. Then I was not allowed to talk to other staff at work without her interference. And the last straw: all tasks had to be completed quickly and error-free. If I failed to meet either criterion, I was considered not fit for the job.

Working had become such a nightmare that I was more stressed with my boss than with the work itself. I quit the job after five months, yet it still took me three weeks to recover and regain my self-confidence. Later on I heard that the boss hired a few more staff members, all of whom left within seven months to a year.

This disturbing experience kept me wondering: Since when did a simple nine-to-five job become a people-screwing competition? How are we going to be the future role models for a younger generation if we indulge ourselves in the dark side of our personalities? If more people try to be 'nice' rather than nasty and self-indulgent, more will receive fair opportunities and treatment, and together we will grow.

Name withheld
By email

Another surveyor

I refer you to your interview with David Dahm (June INTHEBLACK).

I was pleased to read the interview and it was refreshing to hear of an accountant who contributes to the health community in the way David is doing. Congratulations to him.

However, I felt reporting that 'He [Dahm] is the only accountant in Australia who is an Australian general practice accreditation surveyor' needs a little attention.

This is not accurate. I, a CPA, successfully completed GPA Accreditation Plus RACGP Standards & Surveyor training in October of 2005, and have been engaged in surveying of a general practice through GPA Accreditation Plus.

After nearly 10 years in the health sector I felt a need to become more involved in the clinical side as my experience is in administration. I am motivated by purely wishing to understand the service side of the business.

Becoming a surveyor facilitates this, as it allows you to bring together audit concepts and techniques that are fundamental to an accounting environment, and apply them to a service area. The principles are the same; the context is different.

I would find it difficult to believe there are only two accountants in Australia involved in surveying of general practices. From my experience, the problem I have found with making absolute statements is that it may lead to discovering there are more people involved.

Reno Capanna CPA
Director of finance and resources
Isis Primary Care Inc
St Albans, Vic

More spreadsheet controls

I read with interest the article entitled 'Model Misbehaviour' (July INTHEBLACK).

I have been a CPA for over 10 years, and, from my experience, I would like to add to your checklist on types of controls businesses should consider when using spreadsheets.

Create a user manual. As you stated in your article, 'Often spreadsheets are handed on to someone who doesn’t understand the logic applied by the person who originally developed the spreadsheet'. A manual of what the model depicts, along with a step-by-step process of updating the spreadsheet, would assist users.

Have a reconciling total. Too often I have seen reports produced from information downloaded from other databases, yet the total of the spreadsheet model does not reconcile to the original database. If only part of the information from the database is used in the spreadsheet, reconcile the totals, explaining why part of the data was excluded.

Have a central register for spreadsheet models and what they depict. I have seen a number of organisations in which different departments have developed a model to produce similar reporting formats. If this was known by central IT, they would have developed a report from the mainframe to perform the task and would have saved the data manipulation and time spent by staff.

Most importantly, the spreadsheet model should survive the originator.

David Furze CPA
Qld

Accounting for the planet

Tax-reform proposals past and present suffer from one deficiency: they focus on the restructure of a progressive income-based taxation system.

Why in our environmentally challenging times are we not taking a completely fresh approach and abandoning our reliance on labour- and income-related taxes?

Let people enjoy their hard-earned money. Instead, all revenue collection should be derived from an incremental charge on the use and abuse of all natural resources – from land to water and air, to the electromagnetic spectrum and minerals in the ground; from animate to inanimate resources.

This system could be supplemented by directly funding universal health and education systems through a mandatory levy on all trackable income.

Will people warm to my proposal? Of course not. They will vehemently oppose such radical change. Phased-in implementation over a generation or so is therefore advisable. Will Australians embrace such drastic, but just and equitable, measures? No, there will be uproar. My answer to that: This is the price the individual pays for living in a wealth-creating civilised society. One cannot create wealth as a loner on a Robinson Crusoe island.

Our planet confronts 21st century mankind with challenges in an unprecedented way, as never before in all of civilisation. To adapt to the changed environment, cooperation and teamwork rather than competition and hierarchies are the answer.

This quite revolutionary revenue-raising system could be a step towards the healing of planet Earth.

Margit Alm CPA (retired)
Eltham, Vic

Auditor independence not yet achieved

I have read and studied far too many attempts to deal with the issue of auditor independence in a proper way. Australian legislation, international legislation, best practices, recommendations, etc. And while helping to mitigate the problem, they all seem to miss the target.

So long as the audit fees are paid to the audit firms by the companies being audited, there can never be such thing as auditor independence. No matter how many independence declarations the auditor might sign, no matter how often people involved in the audit rotate, there’s still an enormous financial interest that contaminates the independence concept.

An approach could be for all public companies to be allocated an audit firm by ASIC, at ASIC’s discretion or some more reasonable rule. Audit firms willing to participate in the process would then have to enrol at ASIC to be available to be assigned to any external audit. At the end of this they’ll be assigned a professional fee in accordance with the magnitude of the task undertaken and the resources involved.

In order to pay the audit fees, ASIC will have to raise money from the public companies subject to external audit. Hence, these companies will then have to pay a specific tax based on a reasonable estimate of the value of the audit service to be received. There is no duplication of costs, since they won’t have to pay any money directly to the audit firms.

Once the financial interest is reduced or eliminated, it is crucial to assign penal responsibility to any auditor participating in fraud, or acting with unjustifiable negligence. It won’t be until they are faced with serving time in jail that they will stop taking part in unethical dealings and will start taking a more professional and careful approach.

What I intended to provide was a simple draft of the main changes I believe are needed if the profession truly expects to regain the lost confidence. If that is not the case, then we will probably witness the creation of a new body in charge of auditing the audit firms, at the expense of all taxpayers, just to discover that nobody did a proper job, that collapses continue to occur and that nobody seems to be held responsible.

Sergio Gerosa ASA
By email

Short-term sacrifice, long-term gain

Subsidies and feel-good promotions are not the way for young graduates to get experience – cheap labour to offset the cost of training someone who knows all the theory but none of the practice is.

In any free-market situation you need to be aware of the potential for abuse. 

But there are many who will appreciate the benefits of mutual short-term sacrifice as an investment in long-term gain. An example is an accounting graduate who offers to work a week for no pay in a public practice office.

If at the end of the week both employer and graduate are happy, they might be able to come to an agreement whereby the graduate will earn a training wage of A$25,000 for a year.

The problem is that graduates are told they can go out and start on A$45–$50,000, which means that they need to be charged out at A$100/hour for work that just won’t stand that. The result of this unreasonable expectation is that only the best graduates get employed and others struggle doing non-accounting things for the short-term money.
At the end of a long period of study many can’t afford not to chase the short-term money, and are locked into the cycle of chasing a salary higher than they can commercially justify. Apprenticeships worked because tradesmen got cheap labour to offset their own lost productivity. Accounting graduates don’t want to be treated as apprentices because they already think they are tradesmen.

The other difficulty that is not openly discussed is that customers want to believe they have been understood and want to understand what is being said. There are many highly trained graduates who can’t clearly express their knowledge simply because English is not the language they best communicate in. Those people simply have to improve their spoken-language skills. Doing hospitality work and interacting with many different people every hour is certainly an effective way to do this.

The accounting profession is crying out for competent people. If it had not been for the number of females entering the profession over the past 20 years, there would be an even worse situation.

Public accounting is not glamorous. It is just good, honest work that can help people do more with what they have. Maybe CPA Australia’s own advertising is a part of the problem.

Michael Pinn CPA
By email

Care to comment on any business or accounting issue, or want to let us know what you think of INTHEBLACK? Send your feedback to: INTHEBLACK.inbasket@itechne.com

Letters should be kept to fewer than 250 words, and may be edited for length and style.

Reference: September 2007, volume 77:08, p. 10