2008: glad that one’s (nearly) done

Ten days without a post. That’s the longest I’ve taken time out in the three plus years this blog’s been going. It’s given me time to reflect on 2008, the best and yet worst of years for many people I know.

Looking back, I found my 2008 wishlist, almost none of which came true though parts showed signs of materializing albeit not quite in the way I envisaged. That wishlist concentrated on two themes – tax abuse and ethics. As the year progressed, those themes took on a poignancy amplified by the financial collapse in Wall Street and its fallout around the world.

There are way too many stories covering different aspects of the collapse for me to do the topic justice. (Check the Zemanta links at the end for recent stories.) As usual these days, Francine McKenna provides the most thorough analysis of the professional morass, but reminding us that:

Your first obligation as a professional is to your client, not your firm, your partners, or even your family. If your client is doing something illegal then it is to law enforcement. That may seem harsh, but it’s the code that’s supposed to insure that lawyers and accountants, for example don’t cut corners out of their own self-interest and to the detriment of their client’s interests.

I remember that. It is one of the reasons I had a wish around ’stakeholders.’ So while I accept the narrow definition Francine offers as a starting point, I maintain that the definition needs to be inclusive of broader social issues of the kind Richard Murphy discusses.

Suffice to say that I strongly believe the profession took a big step back in the reputation stakes during 2008 but that it is not a forlorn position. The first step comes in acknowledging its role in the current crisis. The second comes in responding responsibly instead of defensively. There are huge pressures as regulators around the world question the fundamentals of what it means to regulate the financial environment.

On a brighter note, I started to come across firms that are innovating in ways I envisaged in 2007. They tend to express innovation differently to the way I see things but are moving in a direction I recognize as value adding. One example shone through right at the end of the year. Neal Morrison from Dublin based McInerney Saunders explained to me how his firm is using AccountsIQ as a way of growing the practice in ther current tough economic climate. Neal is finding that the on-demand model of accounting applications is providing the opportunities I hoped professionals would discover. As a result, his firm is able to offer a much higher quality of service plus new services based around managing the business. I hope to find time to edit the recorded conversation so readers can get a solid flavour of what his firm is doing.

There are others out there, most of which are using on-demand techniques as a way of leveraging labour arbitrage costs in places like Cyprus, the Philippines and India to get the grunt work done. That’s a good start. Interestingly, these firms are thriving and that’s to be welcomed.

Am I looking forward to 2009? Sure. There is much to be hopeful about. But of that, more later.

Defining the new for 2009 | AccMan says:

December 28, 2008 at 6:55 pm

[...] can thrive? That requires invention and innovation at multiple levels. I talked about one such in the use of on-demand as the runway for new service offerings that can be tailored to current business needs. But it goes a lot further. Back to the [...]

Tax Research UK / An accountant’s duty says:

December 29, 2008 at 7:53 pm

[...] issue of an accountants duty has also been picked up by Dennis Howlett and Francine McKenna. Francine notes that: Your first obligation as a professional is to your [...]

An accountant’s duty | called2account says:

December 30, 2008 at 7:45 am