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Cut the rap at ACCA
ACCA members, often described as the leather elbow patch-wearing type, will have to smarten up their act and start donning some bling, if the recent agreement with the Hong Kong Institute of Certified Public Accountants bears fruit.
The HKICPA is celebrating its annual ‘CPA Day’ with…a rap. Entitled ‘’Tute in da House’, the lyrics go something like this:
Well I’m a CPA and that's
what I do,
I know it doesn’t sound sexy to you
But I can tell you I’m a person of repute
And it's all because I belong to
the ’Tute
CHORUS
I wear a suit
I belong to the ’Tute
I wear a suit
I belong to the ’Tute Blinging names are taken on by the somewhat foolhardy rappers, including Patrick Ng as ‘P Diggedy’.
Can’t quite see it catching on at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, or Moorgate Place for that matter. Though
from now on all institutes will be known as ’Tutes.
Colin's X-factor
Click on the cartoon or here to see Colin's latest adventures
Open secret, unless HMRC says otherwise
We all know that the Treasury can get fiercely secretive about consultations. So TS was not surprised to hear the following story. We understand that PwC wanted to advise some of their clients about what was going on with the Treasury’s enquiries on corporate taxation and the EC Treaty. The open secret is that it wants to cut back interest relief and drop the taxation of dividends. So PwC flagged it up on their client extranet. The Treasury then took offence, asking for it to be taken down, which the firm did. Is it really necessary to keep things under wraps quite so much? After all, we do know about the general tenor of the consultation.
Nice work, if you can get it!
Of all the facts about the Mirrlees review into the tax system, the cost of the project was the one TS found most intriguing. The whole shebang is to cost £625,000, the Insititute for Fiscal Studies, launching the review, said. Is that all? By TS’s count, there are 50 different people working on the reviews, including nobel laureates, alongside current and former Big Four partners. ‘Academics work for rather less than we do,’ notes one Big Four partner not involved with the review. You can say that again. According to the court documents of Ken McFarlane’s divorce case, he was being paid over a million pounds a year as a tax partner at Deloitte. The academics will be working for somewhat less than that. Are they all working for free, we wonder?
It's all ice, ice baby!
TS doesn’t expect to be taken out by the great and good of accountancy to a bar so freezing cold that you have to put on a super-duper parka and be served your cocktail in a glass of ice.
But Smith & Williamson did that very thing, when treating their young professionals and clients this week at the trendy Ice Bar on Heddon Street in Soho.
Held at a chilly -5 degrees C, the bar boasts ice imported from the Torne River, 200 kms from the Arctic Circle.
But keep you credit card in your furry mitts. Entrance is a whopping £12 and you get about 40 minutes, plus the chance to wear the necessary ‘thermal cape’.
Thankfully TS didn’t get frostbite, everyone was limited to 20 minutes in the bar, just enough time for TS to cadge a second free cocktail.
From what TS hears, S&W has ice cool IFAs anyway. How else could they plan the tax affairs of wealthy individuals if they got hot under the collar?
Twisting the night away
To our surprise, Richard Huxtable, the finance director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, whom we interview on page 19, did not turn out to be the biggest fan of classical music. Odd, we thought, given his job.
So what music does he like? ‘I am a keen ballroom dancer,’ he told TS. Just take a second
there to let that one sink in. Tight 70s-style flared outfits, throwing your legs in the air and generally, as the saying goes, ‘throwing some shapes’.
Is this a new thing? Was he inspired by Strictly Come Dancing, we wondered. No, he’s been doing it for years, he says.
‘I find it a good way to wind down,’ he says. If he didn’t do ballroom dancing, he’d go home and think about work the whole time rather than the polka.
TS has often toyed with this idea (though our nights out with which- ever parts of the profession feel like paying our drinks bill, might pose one or two problems). Our excuse is that we just don’t have a dance partner to go out with.
