« June 2007 | Main | August 2007 »

Colin joins Facebook

Yes, you got it right. Colin's on Facebook. He may even 'poke' you if you're lucky. View the cartoon here and search for 'Colin Collins' at facebook.com.

July 27, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Alastair Campbell recalls 'ICAEW Years'

TS hasn’t got around to reading Alastair Campbell’s The Blair Years, but diligently flicked through the pics when perusing it in a bookshop one lunchtime.
Lo and behold, one shot, containing Campbell with our favourite politicians: Blair, Brown, err, Mandelson and Beckett, looked pretty familiar.
‘Of course, it’s the small reception room at the ICAEW in Moorgate Place,’ proclaimed TS loudly in the shop. ‘Sshhh,’ was the only response we received.
As TS isn’t paid much, we wouldn’t buy the book, and instead asked publishers Hutchinson for a copy of the pic (above left).
Just think of all those high-powered meetings at the ’tute, mused TS, and we thought the only ones they’d had recently were between the ‘merger’ chiefs Anstee, Freer and Tilley ­ and look how they went.
Picture used with kind permission of alastaircampbelldiaries.co.uk.

July 27, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Tenon's Raynor dumps Dylan for White Stripes

Tenon top guy Andy Raynor has recovered from his trip to see Rod Stewart (see TS earlier), to the point where he has treated himself and the family to another gig, this time to see the infinitely cooler White Stripes.
TS is almost quite impressed. Was it Andy’s choice though or another member of the family? Regular readers will recall that he was dragged along to watch Rod Stewart recently at the insistence of his wife.  He had earlier dragged her along to Bob Dylan (more his era than the White Stripes, can TS suggest?) Are the kids now calling the tune? Or is it coz the Stripes play Dylan covers?
At the very least, bearing in mind the White Stripes gigged for Chelsea Pensioners just the other week, TS is sure that band members Jack and Meg White can handle an accountancy audience.

July 27, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Fur flies in Iris/Sage spat

Now we know accounting software companies like nothing better than a catfight with a rival.
And so it was this week when TS had a little chinwag with a Sage insider who just couldn’t resist taking a swipe at irritating competitor Iris.
In the firing line this time was the promise-cum-slogan of Iris
big boss Martin Leuw, who is always quick to remind us that:
‘Iris will always be an organisation with a face.’
Iris, of course, is private equity-owned, a fact which the Sage mole obviously relished.
The insider said: ‘You always hear Iris talking about how it is an organisation with a face, but it is owned by private equity. You don’t get more faceless than that.’
Ooooh, bitchy, really, really bitchy, but all’s fair in love and war for accounting software titans. The only thing is, there’s always the innocents who get caught up in the crossfire.

July 27, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Mr Death and taxes

TS always loves a guffaw at people’s funny names on Special Commissioners’ judgments.
The latest one to catch our eye is an HM Revenue & Customs official called Peter Death, who was described only as being from the HMRC appeals unit for the North West and Midlands. This pic isn't Peter Death, as far as we know.
What to say about Mr Death? That we hope he isn’t involved in too many requests for extra cash in IHT cases? The family might see it as a tad insensitive.
Perhaps some joke about the Benjamin Franklin line about the two things in life that are certain, with him representing both? On second thoughts, we can’t bear to repeat the line, since we see it in every other press release and newspaper we read.
Let’s hope that the HMRC appeals man isn’t into running any gruelling marathons ­ we’d hate to see Death on his last legs.

July 27, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Beeping accountants...

TS’ esteemed editor-in- chief Damian Wild blogged about a rumour he heard, that a mid-tier firm in Amsterdam drove around the offices of its Big Four rivals using a megaphone ‘urging accountants to defect’ ­ to the mid-tier firm, and not into another career, presumed TS.
‘The rumours you heard are close, though not entirely accurate,’ replied a blogger by the name Tilly. A firm took a truck, with a video wall around the Big Four urging their employers to send texts about their work ­ which were subsequently displayed on the aforementioned wall.

‘Another such tactic is the spoof by Grant Thornton in Holland: it launched a website (Beep Accountants), which claimed to have an in-house divorce service, free meals at your desk and a 9-day working week,’ Tilly added most helpfully. Can’t make head nor tail of it, it’s all too clever for TS ­ and in Dutch. Translation needed please.
Visit beepaccountants.nl, and tell us what it’s all about at takingstock@accountancyage.com. Visit Damian’s blog at accountancymatters.accountancyage.com

July 27, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

KPMG gets ratty

TS is constantly being told that accountancy is a hip, glamorous profession populated by some of the UK’s most progressive minds. But it looks like the old guard is alive and kicking: KPMG’s financial services bods descended on the Royal Academy of Arts near Piccadilly to take in the Summer Exhibition galleries, but the bemused beancounters couldn’t quite get to grips with the modern art on show. But the final straw was a work entitled ‘Metal F****** Rats’ . The great and the good of the firm joined TS in failing to see the artistic merit ­ give us a Turner or a Constable anyday!
See for yourself at royalacademy.org.uk

July 27, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Rod’s it all about, Andy?

Tenon chief Andy Raynor is known as one of the nice guys in accountancy, he speaks well of TS anyway, but one imagined that his darker side would have emerged when it came to light his wife dragged him to a Rod Stewart concert last week.
Some guys have all the bad luck, sources say he wore it well though.
Apparently it was a quid pro
quo for her having been dragged ­ like a rollin’ stone ­ to see Bob Dylan earlier in the year by
Tenon’s self proclaimed Mr tambourine man.
Both those crony crooners are knockin’ on heaven’s door, thinks TS. They think they’re forever young, no doubt.

July 27, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

TS talks absolute ARS

Never let it be said that TS would stoop so low as to resort to juvenile gags involving body parts.  With that firmly in mind, TS wouldn’t dream of telling you about David Bickerton, group head of corporate communications at BP, who was speaking at a soirée recently in the City thrown by annual report designers Radley Yeldar.
Navigating by TS’ unswerving moral compass, it would, therefore, be totally taboo to bring to avid readers’ attention that he embarked on an in-depth presentation about ARS ­ - ‘amplification, regulation and simplification'.
Feel free to shoot TS on the merest mention that he had also planned to talk about ‘environment’ ­ but that would  have involved an acronym that isn’t funny or clever at all in front of a packed audience.

July 27, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Infor commits schoolboy error

The front pages of your favourite accountancy mag recently reported a little competitive jousting between business software groups CODA and Infor.
Well, TS is happy to pick up the story with yet another piece of juicy gossip in this fascinating tête-à-tête. It seems that while the two camps are still busy duking it out, a CODA IT manager recently received a call from an Infor sales rep trying to flog some of Infor’s finest finance software.
TS had to chuckle on learning that the Infor eager beaver started the conversation by asking if this was the same CODA that sold finance software and ended what turned out to be an unsurprisingly short cold call with the conclusion that his sales pitch was probably futile - a schoolboy (and girl) error worthy of Grange Hill. Still, it’s good to see rivals keeping the lines of communication open during the sticky periods isn’t it?

July 12, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Accountants star on Broadway

The Producers gave accountants a starring role on Broadway, now it’s the turn of auditors to get the theatrical treatment, TS discovers.
James Rasheed, a former auditor of a Big Eight firm (that’s going back a few years), wrote a play a few years back called Professional Scepticism, and it’s now enjoying a run in Manhattan’s theatre district.
Exotically named New York Times theatre critic Ginia Bellafante said: ‘The brute at hand is a guy named Leo, a junior manager who antagonistically oversees a team of minions working against a looming deadline on an audit of a shady client. The way he makes his subordinates feel like the rumpled scraps of paper and the hand wipes on his messy desk, are meant to obscure his creeping emasculation- he just can’t pass his CPA exam.’
The very thought of the Beeb running a talent- finding show called ‘Whose Numbers add up
for Leo?’ fronted by Graham Norton and penned by Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber truly chills the blood…

July 12, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Quentin Davies sticks with CIoT

The CIoT was most accommodating to TS last week at the House of Commons, serving us plenty to drink in a convivial setting.
It wasn’t just the CIoT we had to thank, it was also their parliamentary representative, one Quentin Davies MP, whose lower house clout got TS through the door.
Yes, the same Quentin Davies who only the other week crossed the floor to join the Labour party, amidst a welter of complaints about the Tories breaking promises (unlike Quentin) and David Cameron being shallow.
According to the list of member’s interests it also turns out Quentin earns between £5,000 and £10,000 a year from the tax institute for being its parliamentary consultant.

The job, a CIoT spokesman tells TS, involves advising on procedure mainly. The fact that he has crossed the floor will not, the CIoT adds, make a difference to it: ‘He is not there to get us in with one party or another. He is there because he is an experienced parliamentarian,’ the spokesman says loyally.

July 12, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

HMRC ads too scary for tax advisers

TS has seen some scary things in its time, from Keith Chegwin naked to the look on Eric Anstee’s face when the ICAEW/CIPFA merger vote results were revealed. These images apparently pale in comparison to the sight of Adam Hart-Davies, (the bloke off the taxman’s ads) falling through a big sand timer. Well that’s according to two tax advisers who lodged complaints with the Advertising Standards Agency that the ad would put the public off. Thankfully the ASA kicked the claim into touch. Now if they had threatened to put non-taxpayers into big hourglasses, cover them in sand and squeeze them through the waist of the timers , then that could possibly have generated some pantwetting amongst taxpayers. Don’t rule it out…

July 12, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Autonomy counts the cost of Sarbox

Who says that Sarbox is onerous? Well FTSE 250 search technology business Autonomy is hoping that a lot of people are banging that particular drum. It has snapped up a US business specialising in tools that help deal with compliance. Autonomy paid $375m (£187.5m) for Zantaz, which provides email search and archiving services for large businesses. The market is expected to expand, with US federal rules of civil procedure recently changing to require companies to submit information to courts within 90 days, TS’s fellow hacks reported. 

Autonomy chief executive Mike Lynch said: ‘Regulatory requests to companies used to happen once in a blue moon; now they are happening daily.’  It seems a bit rich that Autonomy is set to gain after quitting its US listing several years ago due to the weighty cost burden of jumping through Sarbox’s internal control hoops, but you’ve got to go where the money is, TS supposes.

July 12, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

M&S FD starstruck by Myleene

Despite M&S group FD Ian Dyson parading the retailers’ green credentials in today’s Insider profile, TS managed to make him turn a luminescent shade of pink during Accountancy Age’s interview.
Dyson, not a man to be trifled with, batted away any questions he felt were irrelevant or (frankly) inane. He remained assured and opinionated on any topic, from M&S’s £200m green initiative known as ‘Plan A’, through to pensions and the state of the accounting profession.
At the end of the interview, TS pitched in by asking Ian whether he had met the stunning Myleene Klass (former Hear’Say member and more recently M&S model pictured).

Dyson went flush, then reminisced how he became pretty much tongue-tied when he was introduced to her one evening at head office after a ‘dull meeting’.
‘This is not just a celebrity, Ian, this is an M&S celebrity,’ mused TS.

July 5, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Hello Darling!

Colin's boss sorts out dinner. View the Colin here.

July 5, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

AIU disclosure amazes PwC

TS was somewhat surprised to see the Audit Inspection Unit mention in its most recent report the case of a ‘partner’ in a firm who, after the recommended two-year period, had gone on to become FD of a ‘major listed audit client’. The AIU made nothing significant of it, but the case was pretty clearly that of Chris Lucas, who left PwC to join Barclays.
PwC was surprised too. ‘We were amazed that [the AIU] had it in,’ said TS’s contact at the nation’s biggest firm.

The AIU concluded there wasn’t a problem, but said the firm in question had failed to understand its own ‘chain of command’, in order to establish a possible conflict of interest.
In 2008, the AIU will produce individual reports, and there are fears that comments may expose which companies have been scrutinised. ‘Next year, the production will have to be more professional,’ said our PwC source.

July 5, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Tiers before bedtime

TS has come across a wonderful new description of the firms challenging the Big Four ­ Baker Tilly is calling the wannabes the ‘Mid-Four’.
TS is quite pleased with the term, and has immediately suggested it to its ‘mid-tier nomenclature committee’. We’ll put together a consultation, discuss all views with stakeholders, etc, and then do what we planned to at the outset. You know the drill.

We do have concerns. The term relates to Grant Thornton, BDO, Baker Tilly and one other. Those three are all fairly obvious contingents, with audit revenues at £100m or there and thereabouts, but thereafter, where do you go? To PKF, the next largest audit firm, with revenues of £54m from its audit function? Why not Mazars at £48m then?
The term is more interesting than the FRC’s ‘other significant firms’, but it may just prove a bit too silly.

July 4, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

TS spots Indie kid at trial

TS took a trip down to Southwark Crown Court last week to see how the Independent Insurance trial was going. Apart from the court officials, TS was alone in Court No 2, except for a dapper gent in front of TS.
When TS broke the ice and asked what his connection was to the case, he claimed to have spare time and a general interest in the case. He was clearly a regular at the trial because the lead counsel for the defence strolled past and said: ‘You back here again? You must be a glutton for punishment.’ Then TS’ unidentified new chum pulled out a thick ICAEW document during a lull in proceedings and started to leaf through it, clearly not knowing he was in the presence of the accountancy world’s arch agitator.

TS obviously can’t draw any conclusions about any connection to the institute this may have revealed. But it piqued our interest. Do you have any more information?
Email takingstock@accountancyage.com. Confidentiality assured.

July 4, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

CIoT has a batphone in no.10

Let it not be said that the Chartered Institute of Taxation is behind the news. In fact, when it comes to the most senior cabinet appointments, the opposite seems to be true. It was as if the CIoT had a hotline to number 10 last week, learning before the BBC, The Times, The Guardian and anyone in the Treasury who the new chancellor was.

CIoT president Rob Ellerby fired off press releases at noon, at least half an hour before the formal appointment. ‘The CIoT congratulates Alistair Darling on becoming chancellor. We look forward to continuing our strong relationship with HM Treasury and HM Revenue & Customs,’ the release stated, rather prematurely.
For months, people have been saying the tax profession and the Treasury need to communicate better. Looks like there’s no problem on that front, thank you very much.

July 4, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack