There's a good letter in today's City AM:

Held accountable

I watched Nick Clegg’s interview on BBC Breakfast TV yesterday morning and was furious to hear him say “for those who can't afford an accountant to fiddle their taxes”. How dare he. I assume therefore that he does his own return?

I’m fed up of politicians referring to accountants as one degree away from criminals. Professional, qualified accountants like myself have a high degree of integrity and abide by the UK tax laws, we do not “fiddle” taxes.

Joe Lee ACCA FMAAT
principal, Apple Accountancy Services

I totally agree. Clegg's assault on our profession demonstrates a total lack of understanding of what tax accountants actually do. He should be ashamed of himself.

Filed under: Ethics with tags city am, joe lee, nick clegg
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Via e-mail, I learn of two interesting looking events on financial reporting that the ICAEW is running.

First up is the 2012 Information for Better Markets conference, which will be held on 17-18 December 2012 on the subject of ‘Who is Financial Reporting for?’.  They suggest you can register your interest by e-mailing them.

Filed under: Institutes with tags icaew, martin walker, pd leake
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ASH are making idiots of themselves again:

A new report by FairPensions and ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) has challenged the long held view that UK local authority pension funds can hold 'unethical' assets such as tobacco in order to fulfil a legal duty and  maximise investment returns

With tobacco sales declining for the first time in 2010 and savers continuing to express concerns over whether their money is invested 'ethically', the report claims to expose misconceptions surrounding investors' duty to have tobacco as part of their portfolio. 

The report is launched with figures showing that councils across Britain have at least £1.3bn of employee pension funds invested in tobacco.

Both organisations claim that the three most heard arguments in favour of schemes investing in tobacco can no longer be upheld.

One of the most heard arguments; that is a trustee's "legal duty to maximise financial return" and that a trustee "cannot give consideration to ethical issues", is dismissed by the report as being "somewhat simplistic".

"Although local authority pension funds are governed by different laws to other types of pensions, members of their pensions committees have similar fiduciary duties to pension fund trustees," says the report.

"The phrase 'duty to maximise return' does not appear in any UK statute or case law. Pension fund trustees have a fiduciary duty to invest 'in the best interests of members and beneficiaries'. This is based on the common law duty of loyalty, which exists to ensure that trustees avoid conflicts of interest and do not abuse their position to further their own ends. Trustees also have a duty to invest prudently."

The report also claims that the two other common justifications for the investment practice, (that trustees do not interfere with the day-to-day decisions of external investment fund managers and that tobacco is a low risk, high return investment) are no longer valid.

Now, I mostly hate smokers. I hate the way they smell, I hate the litter they make, and I hate how they're always in the fucking way the whole time, whether walking down the street or when entering or leaving buildings. I hate how they use stupid schoolboy arguments to rationalise their irrational habit. I really hate how they see themselves as funding the NHS single-handed, as if that excuses all their other sins.

However, smoking remains legal. Although I don't smoke myself, I have no qualms about investing in tobacco companies and making money from the addiction of smokers (I've made quite a bit of money in doing so). Yet I can see that some people do have a problem with it.

But when you sign up for a local authority pension, you forego any right to determine what equities your pension fund is invested in. Local authority pensions are defined benefit, ie they promise you what pension you'll get in retirement. If you want a fund to call your own, over which you can make investment decisions, then defined benefit pensions aren't for you. You'll be wanting a defined contribution pension plan instead, just like we private sector taxpayers have been enjoying for years.

You can't have it both ways. Either take your defined benefit pension and shut up, or move to a defined contribution pension scheme. ASH and FairPensions are trying to have their cake and eat it. They can get stuffed.

Filed under: Economics with tags ash, defined benefit, defined contribution, fairpensions, idiots, smoking
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If you don't, you won't find this sign,at the junction of London Wall and Copthall Avenue, much help.

It's pointing the wrong way!

Filed under: Entertainment, Institutes with tags icaew, london, signposts
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The rate of profits made by companies who work in oil & gas are upwards of 44%. This is at the same time as the rates of profit in manufacturing are less than a quarter of that. Clearly, some sectors have a fast buck culture where their rates of profit do not match the work that they are doing. Multinational Companies operating in the UK should have their rates of profit capped at about 25%.

Oh brother. Let's just have a little look at BP's accounts for 2010:

Revenues: $297 billion

Loss before tax: $4.8 billion

Which I calculate to be a rate of loss of 1.6%.

OK, so 2010 was an extraordinary year for BP, given that it had to pay out bilions of dollars to pay for the cleanup of the Gulf of Mexico (see why they have to charge so much now, Eoin?). Let's look at 2009:

Revenues: $239 billion

Profit before tax: $25.1 billion

That's a rate of profit of 10.5%. I give up. Where on earth does he get his idiotic figures from? Clearly not from the accounts or from anything even remotely resembling reality.

Oh, and these are fun:

No employee/er or shareholder should receive a bonus in shares or payments of above £1m in any one year. The Sainsbury's boss for example received several millions in bonuses and shares while the same company hired disabled teenagers to work UNPAID. 

The idea that no shareholder can receive a bonus in shares or payments above £1m in any one year will totally fuck with any large pension fund. They'd have to reduce their holdings to ensure that they didn't receive dividends in excess of £1m, which for many companies wouldn't require that large a holding.

And forcing bosses to receive smaller bonuses will generally mean that they'll seek larger salaries. That makes payment for failure virtually guaranteed.

Ah, but Eoin has a plan:

No worker should ever be allowed to earn 2000% more in one year than the lowest paid worker in the company. The Tories had previously suggested that they might support this during the General Election campaign.

OK, so you've got an apprentice on £2.60 an hour and he works 9-5 for 40 weeks a year. That's a salary of £4,160 per annum. That would mean the boss can earn no more than £87,360. Is that realistic for a large engineering company, or would any prospective candidates make sacking all apprentices their first priority just so they can earn a bit more money?

His grand plan would see the total annihilation of every apprentice programme in the country, dumping loads of half-trained youngsters out of their jobs and onto the street. What a masterstroke!

Filed under: Economics with tags apprentices, bp, dividends, eoin clarke, eoinomics, idiots, oil and gas industry, pensions
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There's been some press attention to a speech that Andy Haldane, a Bank of England director, gave at the ICAEW's Information for Better Markets conference in December.

Of most interest to the media was the suggestion that banks ought to be able to follow a different set of standards to other businesses because, basically, banks are different. I'm afraid I don't agree.

Having discussed this a bit on Twitter, I do share Frances Coppola's concern over banks following the fair value model in a rising market, then seeking to abandon it when the market falls. But the accounting rules were very clear about what should be done. It was unacceptable political interference in those standards that led to the rules being relaxed. It's not clear to me how aligning bank accounting standards with prudential regulation will reduce political meddling. If anything, wouldn't it be likely to make it easier?

Secondly, we just don't need to change accounting standards to make prudential regulation more effective. The regulator already has a lot of power at its disposal to demand information. So why not use those powers instead of reducing the usefulness of information available for shareholders? The precedent is there in corporate tax: the tax authorities request what they need, and amend information in the financial statements if necessary. No serious commentator has suggested aligning tax and financial reporting to reduce tax avoidance. And Haldane's suggestion fails for the same reason.

Filed under: Accounting, Regulation with tags andy haldane, bank of england, banks, frances coppola, fsa, ifrs, prudential regulation
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It didn't take them long to start trotting out all sorts of nonsense about the proposed cap on benefits.

The worst hit, of course, are large families in the south-east, where rents are higher. Even in Tolworth, described by the Evening Standard as the "scrag end of Kingston borough", a four bedroom house will give you little change from £400 a week. Cutting housing benefit to £100 a week – which is broadly what the cap means if you have four children – makes life impossible. After rent, council tax and utilities, a family with four children would have 62p per person per day to live on. That is physically impossible.

Do you see what they've done there?

They've worked out the total benefits package that a family of four would get. Then they've made up some numbers for what this family would have to live on. Then they've complained that this would leave the family with only 62p per person per day.

Of course, this family doesn't have such a paltry amount. They've actually got £11.87 [(£26,000 / 6) / 365] per person per day to live on. And every single penny of that £11.87 comes from the good grace of working taxpayers.

Now it's true that rents are expensive. And that utilities are expensive, so a great deal of that £11.87 needs to be spent on those items. But they're also expensive for those who work. A family of four would need to earn a great deal more than £26,000 in order to actually bring home £26,000 because they have to pay tax on their income. And they would still face the same pressures of expensive housing and expensive utilities. It's an appalling insult to those who work to pretend that the real poverty is faced by those who are propped up to the tune of £11.87 every single day for each of their six non-working members.

And pretending that it's not £11.87, but is really only 62p, makes that insult a thousand times worse. Shame on you, Tim Leunig.

Filed under: Economics, Other blogs with tags guardian, housing benefit, idiots, poverty, tim leunig, welfare benefits
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If you listen carefully today, you might be able to hear some wailing. That's Ian Fraser, Frannie and Ritchie crying because the naivety of their eagerness to blame the auditors for everything has been exposed.

AUDITORS KPMG and Ernst & Young have been cleared of any responsibility for the accounting black hole discovered at Olympus.

A report by Olympus' lawyers absolved the Japanese firms of blame, but claimed that current and former individual accountants - providing oversight within the business - were responsible for 8.3bn Yen (£70.4m) in damages, reported Reuters.

I called this one some time ago.

This would be a good time for the audit-bashers to admit they got this one wrong, and to be less hasty to blame auditors in the future.

Filed under: Auditing, Other blogs, Regulation with tags accountancy age, francine mckenna, ian fraser, idiots, olympus, pwned, richard murphy
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OK, it's very uncool to take press releases and reproduce them verbatim. But I'm going to do it anyway, because this is an important topic. Stress is something that can affect us all, even your humble blogger, so anything that can help accountants out must be good. Best of all, this course is free.

New stress prevention course for accountant managers launched by CABA

Managers working in accountancy are the targets of a new, free stress prevention course launched by Chartered Accountants' Benevolent Association.

Called Mind Matters: Tackling Stress at Work, it is designed to help them identify stress problems in colleagues, minimise stress in the workplace, and also cope with any issues related to stress that they may be encountering themselves.

Lasting one day, the course has been created in response to specific requests from managers working in the profession who have already attended CABA's existing Stress Management and Wellbeing course, which has been attended by more than 3,200 accountants across the country since it was launched in 2008.

Wendy Saunders, Head of Strategy and Development, said: "Research undertaken by CABA continually points to the fact that accountants believe that stress is the biggest issue that they face in their daily lives and popularity of our existing stress management course reflects this.

"The new course for managers is very much something that we have produced as a result of demand from professionals working in the accountancy sector. Managers at all levels who have spoken to us increasingly recognise the negative effects that stress can have on them, their colleagues and the work that they do. They are looking for ways to avoid stress and to cope when it arises. The new course is designed to tackle these issues in a practical way."

Locations and dates for the Mind Matters course during 2012 are:

• 8 February Northampton
• 23 February London
• 7 March London
• 24 April Milton Keynes
• 16 May Birmingham
• 17 May Newcastle
• 23 May Bristol
• 20 June Leeds
• 10 July Maidstone
• 17 July Oxford
• 18 September Leicester
• 19 September Cambridge
• 25 September London
• 3 October St Albans
• 10 October Cardiff
• 16 October Preston
• 13 November Birmingham
• 14 November London
• 21 November Nottingham
• 27 November Leeds

You can book yourself onto a course at CABA's website.

Filed under: Current issues with tags caba, course, depression, free, stress, training
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The FRC has issued some more guidance for directors. It arrives just before the reporting season starts, so I suppose there's still time for directors to take this advice on board.

It recommends that directors should consider, where relevant:

• The company’s exposure to country risk, direct or to the extent practical indirect through financial instruments but also in terms of exposure to trading counterparties (customers and suppliers);
• The impact of austerity measures being adopted in a number of countries on the company’s forecasts, impairment testing, going concern considerations, etc.;
• Possible consequences of currency events that are not factored into forecasts but may impact reported exposures and sensitivity testing of impairment or going concern considerations; and
• A post balance sheet date event requiring enhanced disclosures to avoid misleading investors.

As tends to be the case with these publications, the FRC has found the right sort of balance between providing helpful stuff that directors will be able to pick up and use and teaching gramma to suck eggs.

Download your own copy here.

Filed under: Accounting with tags austerity, currency, directors, financial reporting council, going concern, post balance sheet events
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