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Colin's Office Party
We've all made a fool of ourselves at the annual Christmas bash at one time, and the do at Colin's office is no different. Click on the image above for some festive cheer.
E-tidings we bring
Well it’s not far from Christmas now, but surprisingly the TS desk is not as cluttered with festive cards as normal. Rather than TS losing popularity, it seems that e-cards are the choice for accountants these days.
KPMG sent us a message that shows a line graph turning into a Christmas tree, a pie chart transforming into a mistletoe berry and a bar chart metamorphising into festive candles. Deloitte also has a card featuring baubles daubing festive-looking reindeer.
Not to be outdone, TS has its own surprise for our readers. Our cartoon chum Colin has sent out his own e-card for you to enjoy. Click here to take a peek, and don’t forget to turn the sound up.
A taste for the good life
Last week’s decision by Gordon Brown to stop people using residential property in self-invested pensions may have caused some upset for City directors looking for ways to avoid tax on their annual bonus. But did TS sense a slight touch of sarcasm in the response we received from Tenon?
‘Tenon directors are also disappointed, as their personal collections of fine wines, antiques and Stanley Gibbons stamps have been gathering dust pending A-Day.’
It continued: ‘Peter O’Sullivan, director of Financial Services at Tenon, has extended a warm invitation to high net worth individuals. He is offering to help them drown their sorrows in Chateau Lafite while he licks his antique stamp collection and uses them for this year’s Round Robin while dreaming of the chalet in Meribel that now will never be.'
PwC gets cosy
TS understands that Embankment Place, official home of the country’s biggest accountancy firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, is filling up.
The former Price Waterhouse building at London Bridge is soon to disappear, to be replaced by the 1,000ft Shard of Glass (which PwC is not taking any floors in).
Meanwhile, the lease is about to expire at Plumtree Court, another PwC office, which could see a fair few more staff having to squeeze in under the railway arches by Charing Cross.
There’s some spare space over here at TS towers, if PwC is interested might not be the most discreet place to be, of course.
Practical jokers
The turn of the year sees a plethora of awards being dished out to the great and good in all walks of life. We at Accountancy Age like to get in early, so do ours at the start of November. But others have only just got going.
Which is why TS was sent a note from the ICAEW calling for final nominations for its outstanding achievement award. While we wouldn’t dream of getting involved in such things that could affect our, ahem, journalistic independence, we reckon someone out there may have a similarly wicked sense of humour.
Perhaps the nomination of FCA Charles Tilley would not go amiss. After all, as chief executive of rival institute CIMA, he managed to extricate his organisation from the proposed institute merger talks before the whole thing went spectacularly south.
Well done that man!
The best qualified non-qualified FD
The public sector is getting tetchy about its finance directors. There have been accusations of many departments not having qualified FDs, with the DTI recently having advertised for one.
Who else doesn’t have a qualification, TS wonders? The Treasury has Mary Keegan, with whose qualifications we do not quibble. HMRC has Stephen Jones, who, it should be pointed out, has not yet passed his CIMA exams.
‘He is just about to complete them,’ a spokesman says, before launching into a spirited defence. ‘He’s a trained tax inspector, which is far superior anyway, and he has a first class degree in Maths from Oxford. Try and find another FD who is better qualified.’
Consider the challenge well and truly laid down.
Colin's Aussie tribute
Our man may enjoy the hospitality of or cousins from Oz, but that doesn't stop him from sticking the boot in. Click on the image above to see his latest strip.
Not a slick move
Normally, predictions for the PBR and the Budget are forgotten the minute the chancellor stands up, but one particular suggestion may take a while to live down.
Ernst & Young was vocal in the early rumour-mongering about changes to the tax regime for oil companies, a suspected attempt at heading off tax rises.
TS understands, however, that some of E&Y’s oil clients were not pleased, concerned it would instead encourage the Treasury to raid their coffers. The suggestion disappeared from E&Y’s final PBR predictions, but may be harder to forget for E&Y’s customers, especially given the tax hit oil companies eventually took.
Lawyers steal CCAB thunder
Now, we all know that CCAB institutes have got the hump with each other but at least getting together as the ‘umbrella body of choice’ every now and again allows them the chance to get annoyed with other professional bodies.
Following Brown’s announcement of tax-spreading relief for firms affected by new revenue recognition rules, the Law Society rushed out a press release saying that all its hard work, with some help from the CCAB, had led to the relief.
Unfortunately, one CCAB member was a little less than pleased with this statement, as it was the CCAB members that had done all the donkey work, according to those in the know. It also turns out that the lawyers suddenly reneged on sending out a joint press release with them.
Frankly, TS thinks that the CCAB should know what working with lawyers is about by now, and only have themselves to blame.
Technologically taxing
After parking up the Sinclair C-5 and booting up our Commodore 64, TS sometimes finds itself pitying those less technologically advanced than ourselves.
Take the technophobe tax inspectors at the Treasury as a case in point. Gordon Brown is keen to give inspectors crash courses in computer science so they might accept more applications for research and development tax credits claims for software innovation.
Since R&D tax credits were introduced in 2000, take up has been disappointing, costing the Treasury £1.3bn. Its tax credits e-portal was suspended due to alleged attempts to defraud the credits system. Perhaps the tax man should start loading up those programme tapes now
A future in carbon avoidance?
With the government planning to virtually wipe tax avoidance off the map in the near future, some of you tax advisers must be wondering what you are going to do with yourselves.
But fear not, TS has come up with a cunning plan, at least for those doing personal taxation. TS has been reading up on a new theory to help save our planet Domestic Tradable Quotas, a possible future plan that could see us carrying a card that details your personal pollution allowance alongside a cash card in your wallets.
So, while it might be getting harder to lower the tax bill of clients, TS reckons, should this idea come off, there’s a good opportunity to help ‘massage’ the personal use figures for fuel, electricity and the like. After all, it will be years before the government manages to close all the loopholes you guys manage to find.
Get down under
As its privileged readers will know, TS would turn up to the opening of an envelope if there was free booze and food on offer.
So when CPA Australia, the biggest institute down under, announced that it was going to launch its new London office at one time Harry Potter film set, Australia House on the Strand, TS was there faster than it takes Shane Warne to down a tinnie.
And your favourite back page was not disappointed. True to form, our Aussie cousins had the lager, rather than the usual wine, flowing and TS also enjoyed the cold shrimp and speared chicken.
TS was soon on its way down the road to the Walkabout on Embankment for a night of raucous cultural exchange.
England may have won the Ashes, but when it comes to sinking a crate of cold ones, the Wallabies are still the undisputed champions.
Colin's Christmas Carol
Like almost every office across the country, Colin's workplace has someone who is just a bit too excited about Christmas. See how he deals with it by clicking on the image above.
Jingle all the way
Today (1 December) signals the start of advent, the annual run-up to Christmas in which the streets around TS towers become overcrowded with manic shoppers. It also marks the onset of TS’s annual tirade against the commercialisation of ‘Xmas’ with everyone seemingly using the festive season to plug their wares or services.
So hearty congratulations go out to ACCA for getting in the first Christmas press release of the season. Tax guru Chas Roy-Chowdhury tells us to make sure you keep an eye on costs for the annual office bash, which has exemptions up to £150 per head, or you could end up with ‘a tax hangover’.
TS eagerly awaits the inevitable arrival of releases on tax for employee gifts, saving money through e-cards and the all-important warning of HR fallout from drunken party antics. We’ll let you know when we see them.
Financial controller post a blast
Anyone fancy a job with good prospects, ‘preferable’ tax rules and blazing sunshine every day? If so, TS hears that the position of group financial controller post at Arabic satellite news station Al Jazeera is available. The only problem with the Qatar-based role is that you could get blown up by the Yanks.
Keener students of politics than TS will have been following reports that US president George Bush had apparently planned to bomb Doha headquarters of the station last year.
Still interested? See accountancyagejobs.com for more.
Is Gordon messing with CIoT?
Some have suggested that Gordon Brown chose December 5 to deliver his PBR speech unaware that it was the Chartered Institute of Taxation’s 75th anniversary bash that very night. But TS can scotch such rumours as we can reveal that the chancellor was actually invited to the do. Of course, this discovery opens up an entirely different possibility, namely that he did it deliberately.
Gordon has not been a big fan of tax advisers, who do their level best to reduce his tax take and throw his sums out of kilter. It was chosen, it seems, because Tony Blair was around that day.
Earlier this week, TB gave an insight into their working relationship during a protestor-interrupted speech at the CBI conference. Talking about pensions, he thundered: We cannot afford . . .’ when a mobile phone interupted. Quick as flash, he said: ‘That’ll be the chancellor then.’
Tough call for tax avoidance
Around the time of the pre-Budget report, the TS office is flooded with predictions of what to expect in Brown’s speech from various accounting firms and other economic spectators. It’s made all the more interesting by the fact that no-one knows what is going to happen, but pretend they do.
This year, top 25 firm MacIntyre Hudson has taken this a step further by providing odds on what it expects to appear, although it didn’t say whether it would be taking bets.
Alongside some of the more mundane predictions, TS fancies a fiver on, at odds of 1000-1, the introduction of a 90-day ‘detention period’ for anyone accused of tax avoidance.
Obviously this is tongue in cheek, but it did get TS thinking. Where would offenders be detained?
Perhaps an off-shore location would be appropriate. A reopened Alcatraz would surely fit the bill.
Breaking the Eubank
TS read with sadness that former world boxing champion Chris Eubank had lost his two-year battle to stave off bankruptcy. Last week the Royal Court of Justice dealt the knock out blow on behalf of HM Revenue & Customs, to which Eubank owed £1.3m.
It always seems to be the nicest, most humble people that have the toughest times.
Saying that, perhaps circumstances would have been different had Eubank not called the taxman ‘a gangster’ back in 1992.
Of course, out of tragedy comes opportunity, and TS will be avidly scanning ebay for any mention of articulated trucks, or outrageously expensive jodpurs for sale. Better still, there may be the chance to regain the title of Lord of the Manor of Brighton. Then we'll show those south coast types what's what.
