Via PQ magazine, the dedicated magazine for part qualified accountants of all institutes, we find the following little gem of a story:

Deloitte PQ admits gambling problem

20 May 2010

Is there a gambling problem among ICAEW PQ accountants? Last month we reported on former KPMG trainee Vikas Gupta. This month its ex-Deloitte trainee Umar Qureshi.

He used the firm’s credit card and laptop to accumulate a £8,000 online gambling debt. Qureshi admitted he had breached the credit limit at an ICAEW tribunal recently. He also agreed he had misled his employers by telling the firm that the transactions were fraudulent.

I think they're rather overegging this. Two separate cases out of the thousands of ACA students hardly constitutes a trend.

They don't say what sort of gambling he was involved in. When I was in practice, I heard that one of my colleagues was gambling on share price movements. I guess in retrospect I should have shopped him, because it would seem to be a fairly clear conflict of interest. OK, I don't think he was actually gambling on the share price movements of audit clients, either his own or of our department, but he would certainly have been speculating on movements of either the firm's clients or the firm's clients' competitors.

However, most accountants and trainee accountants I have met take a very dim view of gambling. It's not in our nature - we can see that it's a zero sum game in which the House always wins... and you must over time always lose.

Poor Mr Qureshi got a right duffing up at the hands of he ICAEW's disciplinary committee. He was struck off, with no leave to reapply for six months and was 'severely reprimanded' to boot. Mr Gupta, who had also exploited KPMG's absurdly lax expenses system, was struck off for twelve months. If PQ is right, and there really is a problem among ICAEW trainees, it looks from the evidence that the ICAEW is pretty good at finding them and kicking them out. The odds simply aren't worth it for budding bean-counting speculators.

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Filed under: Ethics, Institutes with tags deloitte, fraud, gambling, icaew, kpmg, umar qureshi, vikas gupta