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Colin's fed to the roses
Click on the cartoon strip or here to read Colin's latest escapade
Taxman ain’t afraid of no ghost
This must have happened before, so TS apologises for the repetition.
Julian Ghosh, the Pump court tax barrister who represented Cadbury Schweppes in its case against the taxman over its use of a complicated loan that would turn income into capital, has a name that is not necessarily obvious how to spell.
In the course of delivering its verdict on the case, the High Court described Mr Ghosh as Mr Ghost. Spooky. How did the mistake creep in, one wonders? A gremlin (or ghoul) must have crept into the judge’s computer.
The mistake appears once, and then literally disappears into thin air. Either way, it didn’t scare off the taxman, who won the case.
Ghosh has been a particular thorn in the side of the taxman, having represented Cadbury in its freedom of establishment case, which threatens to limit the scope of UK anti-avoidance rules on companies set up in UK tax havens.
Who ya gonna call, HMRC?
Hallow be thy FRRP!
As you well know, TS has always been a sucker for a scandal, which is why the Financial Reporting Review Panel has always been the regulator of choice.
TS was nevertheless taken aback this week when the Panel was described with biblical references by Deloitte audit partner Isobel Sharpe.
Sure, the FRRP does like a bit of fire and brimstone from time to time, but TS was still a bit shocked by the comparison. Sharpe said the work of the Panel was biblical because there were ‘fertile periods’ and ‘fallow periods’.
That said, it seems as though the FRRP is slap-bang in the middle of the seven years of plenty, having cracked down on three companies in less than two months.
FDs be warned, the wrath and vengeance of the Panel could well be cast upon you!
And on that note…
Here at TS Towers, one of our key jobs is listening to new CDs so you don’t have to.
And we feel we should draw your attention to a new release by not-so-popular beat combo The Divine Comedy, who briefly hit fame with National Express.
One song on Victory for the Comic Muse tells the uplifting tale of a farm boy who leaves the country for the big city where he joins a firm of accountants as an office boy. Slowly he rises through the firm: ‘but then I discovered my colleagues massaging the figures for personal gain.’
Our hero leaves (‘I’ll not wallow in this house of shame’), tries and rejects religion and joins a band of guerrillas in the hills. He heads back to town where we’re left with the tantalising prospect of him killing the chief of police only for him to reject this way of life too.
And where did this latest addition to the limited accountants-in-pop-songs canon get a recent airing? Somerset House, now an occasional music venue, whose former tenants the Inland Revenue would no doubt be interested in hearing from our protagonist and the firm he worked for.
More work for FDs
It’s a given that FDs are not known for their love of technology. Most see ‘version 10.1.2’ of their accounting application as a cost they could well do without.
But FDs of tech firms are much more IT-savvy. SAP and Oracle finance chiefs will often put their ‘sales hats’ on and spend a lot of time with FDs of prospective and current clients. But imagine them sat with your tech guys implementing said 10.1.2?
Well, during the launch of Enterprise CRM, a new UK partner of on-demand software company Salesforce, TS discovered that ALL their staff must be accredited with Salesforce, ie, able to do the techy implementation work and that includes the FD Daragh Mulchay.
TS wonders how much they pay the cleaners.
