It was our work Christmas party on Friday night. I’m not a big one for parties, especially work parties, and so I would say that I survived it rather than enjoyed it. We had our departmental Christmas lunch during the day time which was relatively civilised, and I did have a few glasses of wine but stopped as soon as I started feeling them take effect, because I don’t really like drinking when I’m not around Babel. I didn’t stay for long at the actual evening party because it was in a rather dodgy part of town, and the friend I was with wasn’t staying long either. I’m glad, because it sounds like it was total carnage. There are some amusing photos on Facebook this morning of a mutual friend of mine and Babel’s without his shirt on, but the biggest story currently doing the gossip rounds is that one of the guys I am working with onsite this week, pulled an 18 year old PA from the Transaction Support department (more…)

I feel a little bit less depressed this afternoon than I have for the rest of the week. I’ve been having one of those weeks where you don’t want to get out of bed, not because you’re tired, but just because you feel you can’t face the day. The audit I’m working on is so rubbish - I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing and the client isn’t here/keeps refusing to speak to us, so it’s virtually impossible to get the information I need to do my job, even if I could work out what that was. Obviously I am doing some work, I’m working quite hard in fact, but most of what I’m doing is probably inadequate and that’s kind of depressing. Like I’m doing it as well as I can based on the knowledge and resources available to me, but that’s still probably not well enough, and everybody out here is basically just hoping that the company goes bust and we don’t have to finish the job. With net liabilities of £11million, it is somewhat difficult to argue that the group is still a going concern! (more…)

I have just accidentally swallowed a tic-tac. That was not the opening sentence I was intending to write, but literally just as I was on the verge of starting typing, I mismanaged putting a tic-tac in my mouth and narrowly avoided choking I can now no longer remember what my incredibly witting opening sentence was going to be (more…)

You might have thought that, as accountants, we were fairly immune from the credit crunch.

Not so.

Our entire Transactions Services department has just been sent home, on the grounds that there are no longer any transactions for them to service. Some of them have been offered redeployment within the insolvency department which, funnily enough, suddenly has a whole load of work on.

The entire office admin team has also been put on notice, while they decide how many of them they want to keep.

No one has done us the courtesy of telling us whether there are going to be redundancies in audit, so currently we’re just sitting here and waiting to see what happens, whilst unsettling rumours abound.

I must say I hate this job, but it will mess up an awful lot of plans if I lose it

I apologise for the extreme lack of blogging recently, but I have been having a hellish sort of week. Workwise I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had any scope to do anything other than, well, work(!) during work hours, and have even had to bring home several hours work a couple of evenings. Bizarrely, this is supposed to be our quietest time of the year, and yet I am ten times more stressed out and under pressure than I was during January and February, which are allegedly our busiest times

What it all boils down to is pension schemes. In order to audit pension schemes, you have to be specially trained, and all of the specially trained people, with the notable exception of me, have either left the firm or are currently at college doing exams. Combine this with the fact that there is an annoying piece of government legislation, which requires that all pension scheme accounts be signed and filed within seven months of the year end, and add into the mixture the fact that the overwhelming majority of pension schemes choose 5 April as their year end to coincide with the tax year. The net result is that the reporting deadline is the week after next, and suddenly there are in excess of twenty half-finished pension scheme audits which have my name on them (more…)

People who are shockingly rude in work emails.

I’m not talking about insults. Rather, people who through either personality defects or sheer laziness insist on firing off a dozen one-line emails to you every day, despite the fact you are actually sitting in the same room.

There is one manager in my office who completely lacks communication skills of any sort. Unfortunately I end up working for her on pension scheme audits reasonably often, and instead of coming to speak to me and tell me what she would like me to do, she emails me with instructions, regardless of the fact that I may even be sitting next to her at the time. This creates a problem for me, because I have been told off in my appraisal for communicating with managers via email, but I feel I have to cover my own back by responding in an email also. If I don’t, I leave myself in a dangerous situation where she has a written record that she asked me to do something and I have no written record of the fact that I told her I’d done it, or hadn’t done it because there was some sort of problem. (more…)

Now I know we all make typos, but I’ve been in a situation today which has really hacked me off. My job has been made unnecessarily difficult because two employees of an international bank couldn’t be bothered to spell check their correspondence before they sent it off.

As part of the audit of a pension scheme, we have to comment on the internal governance and control of the investment managers who hold the scheme’s assets. Normally this is just a formality. These banks and institutions have a report published every year in which a large firm of accountants will certify that everything is hunky-dory. We obtain a copy, review it, and put a note on the file to say it’s all cool.

The only complication is that these reports take a long time to produce. So, in this instance, an investment manager has sent me a report saying their controls were fine up to 31 December 2006. Because I’m auditing the period from 6 April 2007 to 5 April 2008 this isn’t good enough, but no matter - I simply emailed them to ask for confirmation that there had been no changes in control since the date on the report. This is normally a simple, five minute procedure. They are supposed to rely in writing that nothing has changed, I print the email and stick it on the file, we all forget about it.

See below the response I received: (more…)

A friend and I were having a chat this morning and I’m thinking of starting a Facebook group for auditors. See below!

You know you’re an auditor when…

You can’t leave home without a hole-punch and a week’s supply of staples… even if you’re just going to the supermarket.

You make jokes about how boring it must be to be an actuary, but secretly you just wish you were earning that much money and would like to date one.

You have stayed in Premier Inns and Travelodges the length and breadth of the country… and you can talk for hours about their relative merits.

Your favourite words in the whole wide world are “no further work proposed”. (more…)

Today I am going to improve your minds Nah, this is prompted by a discussion with a colleague yesterday, during the course of which I was utterly shocked to discover that he was ignorant of what I consider to be a basic and fundamental fact in accounting and mathematics. I expressed my disgust with the intellect of the youth of today to my mother last night, and was equally shocked and horrified that she had no idea what I was talking about either. (more…)

Today was our annual departmental “Away Day”. We have one of these experiences, which are supposed to foster team building, approximately once every six months. Last year we went to Wolverhampton Race Course, which on reflection was terribly civilised good fun. This year, HR were obviously feeling meaner, and had arranged for us to take part in a version of the “It’s A Knockout” competition, as formerly shown on tv in a decade before most of us were born (more…)