Let me wander off the usual topic for this blog of high flying finance people for just a moment.

Here's a shocker. Grant Thornton has produced  a report saying that the Big Four dangerously dominates global audit markets.

Let that sink in for a moment. This is the UK's fifth largest firm, one that has been complaining about the Big Four's dominance of the UK for some time telling us it has done research that reveals the Big Four dominate globally.

I can't help asking myself the question - would GT have press released the research if it had concluded, by sheer chance, that someone else dominated other than the Big Four? Here's another. Would GT embark on research like that if it didn't know the answer in advance? Who else, like me, immediately thought, 'What else would GT research find?'

Sadly, I can't help feeling GT has managed to tell us something we already knew.

June 19, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

I was giving the issue of FD pay a little more thought. Over the past few weeks Barclays reported a bonus for its FD Naguib Kheraj of £1.75m, Ian Dyson at Marks & Spencer pocketed £525,000 (well above the £300,000 or so average for a FTSE 100 FD) while BT's Hanif Lalani saw his package bust through the million pound bracket for the first time.

But if you really want to see a big pay settlement watch out for what Man Group reports for FD Peter Clarke. Last year his package was £3.9m, made up of what must have felt like a pitiful salary of £342,000 and a staggering bonus of £3.6m. The whole thing makes him the highest paid FD in the country.
Final results have been released so we're only waiting for the annual report to reveal all. I'll let you know when I find out.

June 8, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Hope you spotted that Ian Dyson, finance chief at Marks & Spencer, virtually doubled his pay over the course of the year. He's now on about £525,000 salary and a bonus of about the same amount, according to the annual report from M&S this week.
On figures based on survey last year that would make him one of the 20 highest paid FDs in the country, but I'm not sure that will turn out actually be the case.
FD's pay appears - anecdotally at least - to be going through big rises, which means we could see everyone in the top flight receive big boosts to their wallets.
A headhunter friend told me recently that the recruitment for FDs was going wild, making it a sellers market. Watch out for the fat cat pay accusations any time soon.

June 8, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Government chief accountant Mary Keegan makes an interesting admission in her interview for Accountancy Age this week.

Speaking on the question of whether private sector accounting is superior to the public sector’s she says: ‘If we do lag in any area it is because general management is less comfortable with the financial numbers than you would find in a typical boardroom in the private sector.’

Less comfortable with the financial numbers? These are the people in charge of our taxes and they are ill at ease with figures? How can that possibly be? How could we have government accountants in 2007 that don’t know their numbers!? I want to hang to my head in disbelief.

There is one saving grace - Mary Keegan is now in charge. Formerly of the Accounting Standards Board and before that a professional with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Keegan has always been a pragmatist, straight talking and a doer.

And doers are important. Let’s take another government project - whole of government accounts. That’s consolidated accounts for the whole of goverment to you and me. It’s been on the go for years and looked no where near producing a set of accounts that weren’t about as reliable as a chancellor’s promise to cut red tape.

But past chief accountants have been, perhaps, more preoccupied with the theory, the debate, the intellectual exercise. Mary, I suspect, is more focused on actually producing a set of numbers she can drop on the chancellor’s desk with a resounding thud and say, ‘There, job done.’

Just one thing occurs to me. Would any chancellor really want Kegan to publish such a set of figures? Pu your hands up if you think they really would.

June 1, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)