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I am currently enrolled in a Master of Professional Accounting program at UWG. I intend to develop expertise in Fraud Examination and Business Advisory. The Student CPA is a blog that strives to provide learning resources for accounting courses, graduate business school admission tips, information about careers in accounting, and job search strategies.

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Integrity: Still A Hallmark of the Public Accounting Profession?

Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Category: Audit and Assurance, Careers in Accounting, Financial Accounting, Management Accounting, Master of Accounting, Words to the Wise | 2 comments

Integrity is one of the essential pillars of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) Code of Professional Conduct. A distinguishing mark of the accounting profession is acceptance of its responsibility to honor the public trust. Lenders, investors, government agencies, and other members of the business community rely on the integrity of certified public accountants to preserve the proper functioning of commercial activities. Indeed, the published independent annual audit reports of the financial statements of public companies play a fundamental role in maintaining the soundness of business transactions of all types. Active and aspiring public accountants ought to embrace the obligation to act in a way that warrants the faith that the entire public reposes in the work they do or will do. Richard L. Schmalense, former John C Head III Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, once stated: "Without ethics, business can't be done – or taught". In the wake of the resurgence of high profile Ponzi schemes and corporate frauds, it is now more important than ever to teach standards of professional conduct in undergraduate accounting and business curricula. While it may be impossible to mold every undergraduate student into a business professional that will spouse the form and spirit of ethical standards, it remains nonetheless essential to impress upon students the significance of fostering an organizational culture that values a high standard of business behavior. I personally think that the chapter on professional ethics taught in the introductory auditing course is not enough to ingrain in students' minds the necessity of conducting their duties in accordance with professional standards. Additionally, I don't know why anybody should wait until enrolling into a MBA program before he or she is exposed to a course on business ethics and corporate governance. Business programs need to be reminded that repetition has a pedagogical significance. Ethical cases should be regularly discussed in each and every accounting and management course at the undergraduate level. This will ensure that business and accounting college students are adequately prepared to deal with most ethical dilemmas that could arise in the workplace. It seems to me that universities are churning out a lot of business and accounting graduates that sadly are unable to identify business situations requiring sound ethical judgment. It is about time to start putting an end to this very alarming trend. Accounting professionals have always been held in high esteem because they are viewed as business professionals that do their work with a high degree of integrity. With major accounting firms being repetitively and deservedly scrutinized for failing to flag some flagrant cases of fraudulent financial reporting by their audit clients, I am increasingly concerned that public accountants will soon start loosing the good reputation that so many of their earlier generations worked so hard to establish and preserve.

By Narcisse Sunday, 14th of March 2010 at 11:29:54 PM 2 comments

If Book Smart Is Good Then Well Rounded is Great

Tags: , , , , , , , | Category: Careers in Accounting, Words to the Wise | 2 comments

Most of the finance and accounting internships and entry level job descriptions state, among other things, that only individuals with an overall GPA equal to or higher than 3.0 will be considered for employment. In response to this requirement, business students are naturally spending a considerable amount of their college years focusing squarely on their grades. I don't see anything wrong with college students always aiming for B or higher, heck I always started each semester with the expectation of earning at least a B in each of my courses. Since entry level finance and accounting jobs candidates often have little to no professional experience to show for, employers have resorted to using the grade point average as a way of gauging a candidates suitability for their entry level recruiting needs. In other words, your grades better demonstrate that you are a book smart if you want to get in the front row seats of every entry level job opening in your radar. While you can count on your book smarts to get your foot in the door, it remains however to be seen if that only will be enough to make of you an effective business professional. Indeed, accountants don't work in isolation from other functional areas of a business. For your information there are five functional areas within a business: human resources, finance and accounting, production and operations, administration and IT support, R&D, marketing and sales, and customer service. Therefore, as a member of your organization's staff, you have to be able to fully comprehend how these functional areas affect not only each other but also the organization as a whole.  Additionally, as an accounting professional, you will be called upon to deal with your existing as well as your potential companies business partners including but not limited to financial institutions, suppliers, clients, takeover targets, and and takeover suitors. It takes more than good grades to be able to consistently and effectively provide answers to the different challenges facing your organization. I personally believe that it takes a well rounded person to be a high caliber business professional. So what is a well rounded person you may wonder? MSN Encarta® defines a well rounded person as an individual "having abilities, experience, or achievements in a wide and balanced variety of fields".  In the context of the business world, a well rounded professional is not only well educated but she also has interests in a variety of things including but not limited to traveling, reading on a variety of topics, attending social gatherings, learning about policy issues, learning about business news, keeping up with current news events, and mastering new skills. Obviously, you don't get to turn yourself into a well rounded business professional overnight. It's indeed the cumulative result of years of personal development. For some individuals, this development process all starts in kindergarten. There are families where the parents make a concerted effort to create conditions as conducive as possible enabling their children to become well rounded citizens and by extension well rounded business professionals. However the latter constitute the minority. Most parents are running to busy of a life to stop and worry about these kind of issues. I am however one to believe that your family lineage should never dictate the kind of person you aspire to be. I gave you earlier the shared characteristics of most well rounded business professionals. If you find yourself reading this post, I urge you to take an introspective look at yourself in an attempt to assess which other areas of your life, if any, require additional efforts on your behalf so you also can truly morph  into a well rounded business professional.

By Narcisse Sunday, 7th of March 2010 at 06:10:19 PM 2 comments

The Art of Picking your Own Top Accounting Firms to Work for

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Category: Careers in Accounting | 4 comments

I have some friends who, right out of college, happily accepted jobs offers from some of the top accounting firms. However less than a year in their jobs, my friends are already venting to me how frustrated and disappointed they are with their work lives.  Very often, we accept a job offer only to find out a few months down the road that the job's requirements and/or firm's culture were not a good fit for us. When we are just out of college and we receive a job offer from an accounting firm, we often naively say yes to the offer without conducting due diligence. Even the summer internship at that CPA firm might not give you enough inputs to assess whether you are a good fit for the job's requirements and/or the firm's culture. This is because you are in most instances so focused on selling your skills to the prospective employer that you omit to objectively study the prospective employer's work environment. It should not be a surprise then that you feel frustrated with your job within a few months or couple of years of being hired. Most employees who find themselves in such a situation  -The Lord knows there are thousands of them out there!- will blame it all on their employer. Let's be realistic here, the source of your frustration stems from a concept called the expectation gap. In other words, the reason junior level public accounting professionals get disappointed with their work life is because there is a sizable gap between their pre-employment expectations and the realities of their job. The best way to shield yourself from post-hiring disillusions is to do as much homework as possible on the prospective employer before you accept a job offer.  By now, you must be wondering how you should best go about screening out prospective/potential employers. It's all comes down to harnessing the power of the worldwide web.

  • Glassdoor.com: In case you don't know, glassdoor.com provides salary surveys, employee reviews, and interview tips on over 78,000 companies. You will find quite an amount of information about most national and regional accounting firms when you visit glassdoor.com. All the reports you find on glassdoor.com are graciously provided by actual current and former employees. Now this is no some hear said type of reviews. You are getting all the information right from the people in the trenches. There is a little twist however, you have to be a registered member of glassdoor.com in order to be granted full access to the website database. For your information, glassdoor.com is a free service that requires free membership just as  twitter.com, facebook.com, and linked.com do. Because all reviews are anonymous, it is very unlikely that you will find some politically correct reviews. Sometimes, you will come across reviews by angry current or former employees, it is therefore very important that you use good judgment as you browsed the wealth of information available at glassdoor.com. All in all, glassdoor.com is a very powerful tool for screening out potential accounting firms and I would recommend every existing and aspiring accounting professional to add it to his/her job search tool box.
  • JobVent.com: This website is somewhat similar to Glassdoor.com in that current and former employees submit reviews on their overall experiences with the companies they worked or are working at. No membership nor registration is needed to dig deep into the data available at JobVent.com.
  • Facebook.com: The way I have used Facebook in the past is to conduct a search using a specific accounting firm name. For instance, I would search for let's say Firm XYZ then I would narrow my search down to people. The final results will give you a list of Facebook members that are or were affiliated with Firm XYZ. Once you have that list, all you need to do now is send out private messages to several of those people to ask them why would somebody want to  work for Firm XYZ. It's very important  that you contact people living in different geographical locations or else you will sound suspicious. You won't get a reply from everybody or if you do get a reply it would likely be one that is politically correct, however all you really need is 5 to 10 balanced responses and you will be on your way to building a realistic profile of the accounting firms you are looking at joining.

Although deep in your heart you believe you are the perfect fit for a job opening, the company offering the position might not be enough of a good fit for you. If you don't want to fall victim to what I earlier referred to as the expectation gap, I encourage you do as much research as you can to find out what current as well as former employees think of the company you are considering joining. The three websites I just shared with you will certainly get you started toward that end.

The following is a list of sources where you can find potential CPA firms that you can target in your job search.

1) Accounting Today Top 100 Firms(2010) (Comprehensive and interactive rankings of US accounting firms on a national basis, regional basis, by services, etc…you are going to love these rankings)

2) Top 100 Accounting Firms (This is an "unofficial" list maintained by James Cave, CPA. Although the list is unofficial, most of the CPA firms featured in it are indeed among the largest in the country)

3) Practical Accountant Magazine's 16th Annual Survey of Regional Firms (This list is somewhat similar to the previous one. You get a regional breakdown of the public accounting industry)

4) Accounting Today 2008 Best Accounting Firms to Work for (The list is not very exhaustive but it can be beneficial for those of you who want to work for an accounting firm that promotes work/life balance)

5) INSIDE Public Accounting 2010 Top 100 Accounting Firms (This might be one of the most authoritative sources you will find on public accounting firms rankings. INSIDE Public Accounting  is "the only publication to report and analyze the news, strategies, trends and politics that affect the accountant, his firm and the profession") I hope these resources help you locate your next employer. As you pursue your search for an employment within public accounting, always keep in mind that you only can affect the level of success you can achieve.


By Narcisse Sunday, 14th of February 2010 at 09:15:40 PM 4 comments

The Best of Internet Job Searching Tools (Part 2)

Tags: , , , , , | Category: Careers in Accounting | Leave a comment

This week's post is a continuation of the first of the two part series entitled "The Best of Internet Job Searching Tools". The previous post featured two leading internet job search engines: Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com. Just as I told you last week, I reserved the best for last. Today I am going to share with you two of the best kept secrets among online job hunting utilities.

  • TweetMyJobs.com: The folks at TweetMyJobs claim to be the largest Twitter job board. They might as well be right since they currently offer over 7,000 Vertical Twitter Job Channels from over 7,000 companies worldwide. By job channel, you should understand job categories. By signing up to this service free of charge, you can have new job openings served to you right on your mobile phone if you have a smart phone that enables you to stay connected to Twitter. If you don't have access to Twitter through your mobile phone, you can always use TweetMyJobs.com on your personal computer. The most important feature of this Web 2.0 job board is you can submit applications right from your mobile handset. In this tough economy where employers get flooded with resumes, it pays to be among the first to apply. Here is a video from ABC 7 Arlington, VA that showcases how TweetMyJobs.com is changing the face of job hunting.

For those of you who would like to get better acquainted with the capabilities of TweetMyJobs.com,   I urge you to check its FAQ page.

  • LinkUp.com: LinkUp is a web based job postings aggregator that only scrawls companies online career pages. There are over 20, 000 companies websites that LinkUp.com is currently monitoring for new job postings. One of the advantages of LinkUp.com is the fact that your search results  won't contain some of those suspicious job postings that you are liable to find when using Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com. Additionally, because Linkup.com only focuses on companies internet job boards, you are more likely to uncover jobs postings not accessible through Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com. However, I have to point out that this is also LinkUp.com Achilles' heel. In other words, if you rely solely on LinkUp.com to conduct your online job search, you won't find out about job postings that are advertised in your local newspapers and online job boards such as Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com. Another distinguishing feature of LinkUp.com is the fact that when clicking on on your job search results, a new tab opens inside the LinkUp.com website. The tab feature is geared to allow you to browse job postings without having to constantly click on the back button. Here is a shot of the tab feature in action:

Just as it is the case with the other job search engines, Linkup.com enables you to receive updates on specific job search queries through email alerts or through RSS feed  subscription.

This sums up our two part series entitled "The Best of Internet Job Searching Tools". Some of you must wonder which of these online job search utilities is the most effective. My answer will be they are all effective in what each strives to accomplish. Using a combination of all four of them will increase your chances of uncovering a high percentage of the job postings advertised on the web. Like somebody once told me, job hunting is a numbers game. The more job applications/resumes you submit, the sooner you will be hired.

By Narcisse Saturday, 30th of January 2010 at 04:32:35 PM Leave a comment

The Best of Internet Job Searching Tools (Part 1)

Tags: , , , , , | Category: Careers in Accounting | Leave a comment

The past eighteen months provided us with a horrible job market. A substantial number of people who lost their jobs at the beginning of the Great Recession are still receiving unemployment benefits because job vacancies have dried up across most industries.  There is a variety of ways to conduct a job search such as leveraging one's personal and professional networks, attending job fairs, walking in companies' offices, reading the classifieds, and searching the web.  Because of its pervasiveness and convenience, internet job hunting has become the most widely used avenue for finding job vacancies. Because of the wealth of content available on the internet, it is often difficult to find reliable, relevant, and authoritative sources of information. After a series  of trials and errors, I was finally able to identify four nifty web-based job search aggregators that are constantly updated with mostly legitimate and current job listings. From personal experience, I find it easier to cope with the job hunting related stress when I am able to apply to a couple of jobs every working day.This is since I can wake up every morning looking forward to a phone call because I submitted my resume or/and filled out a few applications the preceding day. I have successfully tried and tested each web based job search tool that I am about to recommend to you. In this first part of  the "The Best of Internet Job Searching Tools" series, only two online job search engines are going to be featured, the other two will be revealed in the second part of this post.

  • Indeed.com: Indeed.com was launched in 2004 and has since literally revolutionized the way online job search is conducted. It used to be that you had to go from one online job board to the next in order to conduct an effective web based job search. Indeed.com is a meta search engine for job listings. In other words, it aggregates job listings from a multitude of sources including but not limited to internet job boards (i.e Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com), the online edition of newspapers, and companies' career pages. What I personally like about Indeed.com is that fresh job listings are continuously added to the search results. This is awesome because you can conduct you search several times a day as opposed to doing it once daily.  Additionally, Indeed.com provides a set of cool tools that allow you to conduct your job search with greater efficiency. For instance, you can receive new jobs email alerts as per your search criteria or you can subscribe to an RSS feed of new jobs as per your search parameters. Indeed.com is a very powerful, versatile, and yet easy to use job search engine. The following is a video tutorial on how to execute a basic job search with Indeed.com. If you want to get the most of Indeed.com, I suggest that you visit their Search Tips page.

  • SimplyHired.com: SimplyHired.com is another leading job search engine. It is overwhelmingly similar to Indeed.com in terms of features. However SimplyHired.com offers more Web 2.0 features than Indeed.com. The term Web 2.0 is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user center design, and collaboration on the web. SimplyHired.com allows you to share specific job search results on Twitter and Facebook. More importantly if you have connections on Linkedin.com, SimplyHired.com features a "Who do I know" tool that enables you to check if any of your Linkedin.com contacts is associated with one of the companies appearing in the jobs search results. Now this is a terrific functionality because you can request a referral from one of your contacts if he/she happens to be associated with any of the companies listed on your job search results. Please click on the following video to watch an overview of SimplyHired.com features. If you wish to optimize you SimplyHired.com user experience, I highly recommend that you visit their Job Search Tools page.

This sums up the first of two parts of "The Best of Internet Job Search Tools". The other two job search engines will be revealed in the second installment of this series. All I can say for now is it only gets better so be sure to revisit TheStudentCPA.com very soon.

By Narcisse Saturday, 23rd of January 2010 at 03:59:35 PM Leave a comment

Emerging Niche Practices in Public Accounting

Tags: , , , , , , , , | Category: Careers in Accounting | 2 comments

The business world is constantly evolving and so is public accounting. Accounting firms are now more diversified in their service offerings. Indeed, accounting firms are no longer only focused on audit and taxation services. If you want to be successful in public accounting, it is very important that you stay up to date with the growing trends in the profession. The chief purpose of this blog is to provide relevant information to aspiring CPAs so they can better design their career path as they enter public accounting. Without further delay, let me give you a quick overview of some of the emerging specialties in public accounting.

  • Forensic Accounting: Forensic accounting is a specialty practice focused on providing investigative services designed to uncover fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, the concealment of debts, the concealment of assets or other fraudulent activities, or even financial crimes. Forensic accountants are often used as expert witnesses in civil and criminal trials. All of the larger accounting firms, as well as many medium-sized and boutique firms, provide forensic accounting services.
  • Information Technology Services: More and more CPA firms are now creating an Information Technology practice to assist their clients in aligning their IT infrastructure with their corporate strategies. Examples of services offered are Information Technology planning and strategy, Business Software  selection and development (i.e Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM)), and content management and storage.
  • Environmental Accounting: Many companies are now interested in being green, as more and more consumers and investors are placing a high value on environmental responsibility. Indeed, the occurrence of an environmental scandal can significantly deteriorate the image of a business and in some instances it can go as far as destroy shareholder value. To help companies mitigate the potential environmental risks that are inherent to the nature of their business, CPA firms offer a variety of services including but not limited to: compliance audits with regard to environmental regulations, systems audits aimed at assessing a company's environmental risks management practices, and audits to appraise the manufacturing process to ensure that products meet specific standards.
  • International Accounting: As the phenomenon of globalization has led the world's economies to be more interconnected, CPA firms are providing advisory services in the areas of international commerce rules and regulations, international tax laws, consolidation / translation of foreign financial statements, and transoceanic mergers and acquisitions. As a matter of fact, there have been discussions here in the US to adopt International Financial Reporting standards (IFRS), which is the equivalent of the US GAAP in other parts of the world.
  • Assurance Services: Assurance services have been defined by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) as "Independent Professional Services that improve information quality or its context".  The main purpose of Assurance services is to dispense independent and professional opinions that improve the quality of information to management as well as other decision makers within a given firm. Examples of assurances services include but are not limited to: business risk assessment, information systems security review, and internal auditing outsourcing.
  • Consulting Services: Accounting firms with a consulting practice may provide any number of specialty services for a company, including performance management , cost control and containment, buy-sell agreements, business valuations, and strategic planning.
  • Personal and Financial Planning: Representing one third of the US population, the baby boomers will gradually be retiring from the workforce over the next decade or so. As a consequence, CPA firms are experiencing tremendous growth in their financial planning practice. Some of the services more sought after include but are not limited to: wealth management, retirement services, insurance and risk management services, tax planning, estate planning, and investment planning.

As you might have noticed, the public accounting industry offers more exiting career paths today than ever before. Although you might be subject to working in either the tax or audit department your first three years inside an accounting firm, you will ultimately enjoy a full range of options when you are ready to specialize in a specific line of practice.

By Narcisse Monday, 11th of January 2010 at 03:52:11 AM 2 comments
 
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