KPMG technology sucks: official

If you’re in KPMG Dallas, Chicago, New York, Fort Worth - or pretty much anywhere else for that matter, you already know what the rest of the world suspects: your firm’s idea of technology sucks. So much so in fact that a couple of emails are doing the rounds in the US which say:

From a senior associate at KPMG:

The best question is: 4. Do you feel like KPMG’s lack of technology is slowing down your development and progress in your career? My response: Absolutely. The use of morse-code telephones, word processors and telegraphs is a hinderance to my auditing ability. My developement has suffered too - I cannot speak in full sentences, have forgotten my colors, and can no longer put shapes into their apporpriate slots. My career has suffered as well. After looking around for another job, I am only eligible for jobs at Taco Bell and McDonald’s because they have an automated beeper when to take the fries out. I don’t know how to use this thing called a telephone, and is there a little man living inside, what people refer to as, a “computer”?

and this from another associate:

When is KPMG going paperless? I don’t know but I hope soon. Earlier this year I was flipping through some work papers and I got a nasty paper cut. The cut caused me to bleed all over the general ledger. We didn’t get it electronically because unbeknownst to KPMG, typewriters don’t receive electronic mail messages, so I had to ask the client for another one. Well let me tell you, the client was so angry at the request, not to mention the bloodshed, that he went to his boss, who went to the CFO, who went to the audit committee, and they dropped us as auditors mad fast. When this happened the partner was so angry that we lost the client he made me work for 27 days straight. I didn’t mind these hours because this was half of the hours I was working during busy season and the people I was working with were great, when they weren’t yelling at me, and fun to be around, in-between the games of who can hit me in the eye with a paperclip the most times in a minute. And flexibility; are you kidding? The team was totally flexible on when I could take my one personal phone call and two bathroom breaks. They would even let me combine two of them for an extra long break. You would be surprised at how much you could get done in 10 minutes. KPMG has great Mothers-in the workplace program. In fact it’s so great that even though I’m a guy I wish I could be a part of it. And whoever told you that 1-5 years is “as long as they want” was totally mistaken. I heard of this one girl who worked at KPMG and she had kids when she was 25 and didn’t return until she was 55. KPMG was so excited to have her back after missing her for 30 years that they immediately promoted her to partner. Also I don’t know where you heard that KPMG was the bottom of the big four, but remember if you start from the bottom the only way you can go is up! In closing, I might not have answered all of your questions but with the information I have provided I am confident you will make the right decision.

While each person in the chain thinks they are ‘hilarious’ with humour comes a grain of truth, although in this case there’s a lot more to this. So riveting are these emails they’ve made their way to Deloitte & Touche. It can’t be long before they hit PwC and EY and then who knows where from there?

Cue Francine methinks.

By the way: note to regulators: you guys think these folk know their stuff. Right?

Technorati Tags: big four, Deloitte, ernst & young, KPMG, PWC

Fresh faces, fresh ideas, the future

This is Matt Mullenweg, the face of the future. If you’ve never heard of him then consider this:

• Founder of Wordpress and the company behind it Automattic which makes great anti-spam software
• Wordpress has had 5,880,790 downloads
• In 2007, Wordpress.com had 1.8 million signups
• The company had seed funding of $1.1 million
• Last year it is rumoured to have turned down an offer of $200 million
• Yesterday Automattic announced having raised $29.5 million for a minority stake
• New stakeholders include the New York Times

Born in 1984

Yesterday Chris Dalby moved my Wordpress instance. I ain’t going nowhere without Matt’s software.

When I look around at an aging profession where partner age is creeping up to around the 50 mark and when I’m told that you can’t do a great job unless you’ve got experience and then reflect on folk like Matt, or that Google which, according to Stephanie Olsen at News.com:

What’s unique about Google is the vastness of the wealth it has created in such a short time and the impact that money could have in coming years. Have the Xooglers had a big hit yet? No. But Google expatriates are likely to play a greater role in the Valley’s business and culture than any other group, bringing their company’s brainy and shoot-for-the-stars sensibilities to new tech companies, philanthropic causes, and even a wine bar or two.

I have to ask - when are professionals going to wake up?

As I’ve said on many an occasion, the best performing firms are those that recognise the value innovative technology brings. I don’t care that people like Matt are younger than my oldest daughter - and by some years. I care that they have the talent to go do great things. And in a lot of cases, they give it away.

Ask yourself this. Where is your business model for open source accounting? Does that term make any sense? It should because it describes the commodity that represents 60% of current fee income that I guarantee will disappear in a few years’ time.

Pic courtesy of Flickr via DFOF

Technorati Tags: wordpress

HMRC and IRS catching more tax evaders

Wolter Kluwer which owns CCH reports:

HMRC has raised £415.3million through investigations into business self-assessment forms over the past year, a 35% increase on last year when it netted £308million in additional tax, interest and penalties…[Neil Tipping, Senior Consultant] “And, whilst it may seem alarming to businesses who are about to submit their returns at the end of this month, the extra figures are in fact as a result of better targeting by the Revenue.

“In the past HMRC have been know to take a general broad brush approach to investigations, but over the past 12 months improvements to their risk profiling system has enabled them to target tax avoidance and evasion more effectively.”

Meanwhile in the US, Russ Fox reports that IRS audits have risen significantly. According to the IRS’s official results:

Overall, enforcement revenue reached $59.2 billion, up from $48.7 billion in 2006 and nearly $34.1 billion in 2002.

That’s about 98 times as much as HMRC for a population six times the size of the UK. Given that Russ has a very healthy blog on tax fraud, I’m not surprised.

Note that Neil Tipping talks about profiling. In my view this is a very good reason to use on-demand services that can aggregate results and provide the basis for benchmarking and analysis. If your firm specialises in any kind of trade and has reasonable numbers of clients in that niche then it is possible to develop statistical analyses that can be used to help clients better understand the risks they face. Those same stats can also be used to help argue cases where HMRC claims ‘local averages.’ They will always have access to a deeper pool of figures than the professional but local knowledge of the kind only professionals can acquire makes a huge difference.

As an aside, I was surprised with Richard Murphy’s assertion that:

The fact that the tax recovered from small business is such a small part of total recoveries is also worrying…The self employed have a much lower compliance rate. The failure to increase recovery from the small business sector as much as is happening in general is of concern in itself.

I’d like to see the stats on this and Richard does say he will write more later.

The last time this was aired on my site (a long time ago) I asserted that average collections from small business were of the order of £2,000. At the time, Simon Sweetman refuted that saying it was more around £500. HMRC has said on many occasions it is endeavouring to get best use of resources. £500 can hardly be worth the collection costs.

Technorati Tags: tax avoidance, tax evasion, tax research

Moving Wordpress servers with Yellowpark

Wordpress offers you two ways to run a blog - they host it on wordpress.com or you self host. I’ve self hosted for over two years because it gives me the widest possible range of options for plug-ins (additional pieces of functionality) and design. Until yesterday it was hosted at Opensourcehost.com who specialise in hosting open source applications - like Wordpress.

Unfortunately, Opensourcehost’s support deteriorated in recent months and over the course of several weeks I experienced a string of unwelcome site outages. Despite telling them each time an incident arose, Opensourcehost.com support denied there was any problem, despite I could see error logs showing very clearly what was happening. Last weekend was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back when I wanted someone to see a specific page and the site was down - again.

Enter stage left Chris Dalby of Yellowpark. He’s a top person who offers hosting (among other managed services) and hosts my Dinglebum site. It’s a low traffic affair but it just works. Chris has excellent references from James Governor and having tasted Chris’s service it was a no brainer to get him to help me move the site.

Two years and some 2,500 posts later, there’s a fair chunk of data to schlepp from one server to another - 250MB in total. And it has to be done right. The Wordpress backup database tools are fine but as we found, they are not quite what’s required to do a proper export/import. Here you really need the Wordpress phpMyAdmin plugin. There’s a useful tutorial for geeks that explains the procedure. And here’s a guide for doing any form of upgrade to a Wordpress site. Rule no: 1 - backup everything. Which is what Chris did.

Chris then hosted the site at a temporary location while we tested to ensure that everything is working as expected. That meant re-activating a set of plug-ins and then running a visual comparison of the ‘new’ site against the existing. It also meant running a post to ensure it ended up in the right place. Finally, I ran some common functions like using the dashboard, playing with plug-in settings and checking the spam filter to ensure everything had carried over correctly.

The final job required changing the nameservers. Think of a nameserver as the phone book where your domain name (in this case accmanpro.com) is translated into an IP address (in the format 255.255.255.0) located at the hosting provider. Nameserver changes take time to populate, usually 24-48 hours so we decided to leave everything in ‘temporary’ mode until the nameserver providers had done their stuff and just to be 100% sure that everything performed as expected.

I didn’t want to do much of this work as I did not want to run the risk of ending up with database problems that I could not handle. I handed the whole problem over to Chris, granting him admin rights to get the job done. Chris took the problem and made it a non event. That’s what I wanted.

We had a few hiccups along the way, largely because of the database problem but Chris took it all in his stride even when I was staring at a screen of - well - not a lot and wondering what was going on.

Changing service providers can be as traumatic as changing banks and the only way to ensure it’s handled properly is to hand the process over to a professional. Yes, I’m paying Chris for the service he provided. It’s not a huge amount but worth every penny in peace of mind. And as an extra bonues, the site now runs at lightning speed.

Technorati Tags: yellowpark

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