If something goes wrong on an audit, whose fault is it? Is it the partner’s fault or the junior member of staff’s fault? Over in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper has provided some interesting commentary on a legal case that is currently taking place concerning an audit undertaken by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). The background to [...]

It’s been a mixed year for Piet Hein Meeter the (former) chief executive of Deloitte in the Netherlands. It started well for him as he was appointed as the new CEO of the Dutch operations of Deloitte on the 1st of January this year. However within a few months his fortunes have changed dramatically. Deloitte [...]

The IT guys I’ve met in my career have all been very nice people. Admittedly they all seem to be slightly mad and do tend to talk in a strange language with lots of mentions of “coding this and coding that”. To be fair though they all probably think I’m slightly mad when I talk [...]

What price should you charge for your products? As any professional business qualification student knows, there are several different pricing strategies that can be used when setting the price for your product. You could for example base it on the internal factors of how much it costs you to produce (cost plus pricing) or you [...]

Is this you? At a young age you decided that a career in finance was what you wanted. Whilst the other kids were running around dreaming of being football players or famous actresses you were busy dreaming about spreadsheets and calculators. You then went to University and worked hard. After that you studied for a [...]

The 84th Academy Awards ceremony (the Oscars) took place last night in Los Angeles. Pwc have looked after the balloting process of the Oscars for 78 years and since they have been involved they have counted in excess of 450,000 ballots and filled over 2,600 envelopes with the winning names. According to pwc there has [...]

So there I was sat down yesterday having a nice cup of coffee and reading the Sunday Times when I saw a full page advert on page 8 which was rather intriguing. It was interesting as it wasn’t clear what it was advertising. There was no reference to a product or company. It started with [...]

He’s just been appointed as the new head of Ernst & Young with ultimate responsibility for the 152,000 EY people in 144 countries but what does his mum think? It must have been a proud moment for Mr Weinberger as getting to be the head of such a prestigious organisation as EY is a pretty [...]

Direct Line and Churchill are two of the UK’s largest and best known insurance brands. Unfortunately though, despite being in the “premier League” of insurance companies they have been a bit naughty and were recently fined £2.2 million. The Financial Services Authority (FSA), which amongst other things oversees the insurance industry, told the companies that [...]

I’m an accountant and I’m proud of it. I think the education and knowledge that you acquire both during your studies and continuing professional education are fantastic. At the start of my career when I worked for one of the Big 4 I spent several years in the Audit department and this was a great [...]