Vietnam

On 25 June, 2007, the Board approved to establish an on the ground presence in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). CPA Australia opened its doors in Hanoi and HCMC during 2008 with two staff in each location, the Chief Representative of the CPA Australia Vietnam operation being based in Hanoi.

During the past years, CPA Australia has made significant progress in building relationships with professional authorities and bodies, including the Ministry of Finance, the Vietnam Association of Accountants Auditors (VAA) and the Vietnam Association of Certified Public Accountants (VACPA). CPA Australia has undertakings through Memoranda of Cooperation with both VAA and VACPA to cooperate and collaborate in the areas of training, international affiliation and mutual recognition of qualifications.

CPA Australia also offers the CPA Australia Passport Program to students in Vietnam. To date, approximately 3,000 students from various universities in Vietnam have registered to join CPA Australia’s Passport Program.
CPA Australia also has close relationships with Swinburne University of Technology and RMIT in Vietnam. During 2009, CPA Australia signed MOUs with RMIT Vietnam in August 2009 during the CEO’s visit to Vietnam and Academy of Finance in Melbourne in October 2009. This week, an Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed with the University of Economics in HCMC.

It is intended that the MOU will pave the way for greater professional collaboration between the two organisations. Under the agreement, CPA Australia will provide training and learning opportunities for students and funding for research in the areas of accounting and finance. CPA Australia will also invite teaching staff from the UEH to participate in CPA Australia’s International Academic Forum, and award scholarships to top-performing students and lecturers.

New Corporate HQ

CPA Australia’s new corporate headquarters opened in Melbourne last night. Senator the Honourable Nick Sherry, Assistant Treasurer, unveiled the commemorative plaque that will adorn the wall at “Twenty8 Freshwater Place”. The new office epitomises our think + create approach to all that we do, and its innovative and environmentally sustainable design provides a best practice work space to encourage collaboration in providing premier global service. Twenty8 Freshwater Place is designed to achieve a 4.5 star rating under the Australian Building Greenhouse Rating Scheme. For this reason, and in other ways too, the office sends an important signal to our stakeholders and to the wider community about who we are and how we go about our business. Much space is dedicated to member reading, research and relaxation areas. I hope that members will visit Twenty8 Freshwater Place when next in Melbourne and see for themselves how impressive their new office is.

CPA Australia Malaysia – Business of the Year 2009!

CPA Australia has been recognised as the Business of the Year 2009 by the Malaysia Australia Business Council (MABC). The award was presented by the Prime Minister’s department with Penny Williams, Australian High Commissioner to Malaysia, in attendance. What a fantastic achievement for our Malaysian Division and for the organisation as a whole! CPA Australia and its members continue to impress wherever the blue & gold badge appears.

Innovation and Variety in Accounting Education

Education is no longer about a single chance to choose and complete the ‘right’ degree. Study options today are as diverse as our employment choices, and some Australian universities are developing new study options in accounting.

CPA Australia has accredited four graduate diplomas in the past 12 months. These new programs provide skilled professionals from other disciplines who wish to move into an accounting role with more options to gain the knowledge they require to support their new career. Students can be confident that completion of these postgraduate programs will enable them to access the benefits and opportunities of membership of CPA Australia and access to the Professional Level of the CPA Program.

These are four different programs, developed by four different universities, in four different Australian states. Each program has been designed to respond to student demand for flexible and innovative options that are aligned with their employers’ expectations – and each course takes a different approach to covering the required core accounting and business knowledge. It is great to see this variety and innovation coming into accounting education.

Interested students can take a look at their courses at the links below:

Victoria University, Graduate Diploma in Professional Accounting

Curtin University, Graduate Diploma in Professional Accounting

Charles Darwin University, Graduate Diploma in Professional Accounting

Queensland University of Technology, Graduate Diploma in Business (Professional Accounting)

Welcome To Our New CEO

Geoff Rankin ended his term as CEO of CPA Australia on Friday October 9 and Alex Malley commenced as CEO on Monday October 12.

Geoff indicated to the Board early in 2009 that he wished to retire, having successfully guided CPA Australia for several years. Under Geoff’s leadership, CPA Australia achieved a great many things. Geoff’s wise counsel was highly valued by the Board, and on behalf of the Board I wish Geoff all the best as he sets out to kick new goals.

Given his involvement with CPA Australia for well over 20 years, Alex Malley is already known to many members, to staff, and to the Board. His passion for the organisation is clearly evident, a fact that those who meet him often comment on. I feel most confident that CPA Australia will continue to build on its many strengths with Alex at the helm. Alex hit the ground running on Monday and has already spent considerable time meeting with members during both Vic and NSW Congresses during the week, and with staff at CPA Australia HQ in Melbourne.

A night with AICD

Last night I had the pleasure of attending a dinner in Hong Kong hosted by the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD).

The dinner was to celebrate the International Company Directors Course that the AICD is running in Hong Kong.

Maureen Monckton, General Manager, Director & Board Development, AICD, was exceedingly kind in welcoming me to the dinner as a representative of CPA Australia.

Maureen and her colleague Fiona had clearly worked hard to ensure that the night was a great success. Maureen spoke briefly to group about the AICDs very exciting plans for development. Maureen and I also shared some casual thoughts and ideas on ways in which the AICD and CPA Australia might further cooperate in the future. To consider doing so makes a lot of sense given the overlap in our membership, and given our shared commitment to improving the management of companies, particularly in the area of financial reporting and management.

I was delighted to find many friends among the course attendees, including my CPA Australia Board colleague Mark Grey, as well as senior members of other organisations. The course attracted a stellar group with attendees travelling from all over the region to attend – kudos to the AICD.

Jamie Allen, Secretary General of the Asian Corporate Governance Association, was guest speaker. Jamie has fascinating insights into the challenges to getting corporate governance “right” in Asia. It is well worth getting along to hear Jamie speak on the subject if ever you get chance. Few know more about corporate governance than Jamie, particularly as it relates to happenings in Asia.

Suzanne Ardagh, State Manager, AICD Western Australia, first connected me to AICD when she visited Hong Kong in July. I must thank Suzanne for working to bring our organisations closer together. There is much that we have in common. As I wrote in a previous blog entry regarding Austcham in Hong Kong, our friendship with organisations such as AICD and Austcham creates reciprocal value for members of both bodies & helps CPA Australia achieve its many goals particularly as they relate to advocacy, professional development, and community outreach.

Friendship with Austcham & Premier CPAs

Deborah Biber, CEO of Austcham Hong Kong & Macau, and her team did a fantastic job (as they always do!) of organising a gala lunch for members of the Australian Business Community in Hong Kong with the Premier of Victoria, John Brumby, last week. Fellow CPA Australia member, Clement Chan, is Chairman of Austcham, and CPA Australia was delighted to support the event.

The Premier spoke of Victoria’s great relationship with Hong Kong and China, and particularly of the investment that Victoria has made, along with many other Australian states, and many Australian businesses, in gearing up for the Shanghai 2010 Expo. During our conversation, the Premier told me that his father is a proud member of CPA Australia and that he had once considered continuing the family tradition but that his interest in politics took him in a different direction. He was delighted to learn that with the launch of CPA Australia’s Pathways there remains an opportunity for him to become a member – a life after politics perhaps John?

The lunch served as a reminder of just how many friends and ties CPA Australia has around the world, and of the importance we place on friendships like the one we enjoy with Austcham. Those links make our lives richer and they create reciprocal value that helps CPA Australia achieve its goals in the areas of advocacy, and professional and community outreach. United we stand.

More than one Path(way) to Success

I took some time out today to flick through some recent back issues of BRW and to look at, in particular, the league table showing the Top 100 Accounting Firms in Australia. Getting to that list required opening up a CPA Australia insert that was placed by our marketing team. I had seen the insert previously, but I couldn’t help but again make a mental note of the excellent profile that it gives to Pathways, and to CPA Australia in general. The Pathways initiative holds much promise to create fantastic career opportunities for future CPA’s who otherwise would not have been able to join the profession, or who would have joined it via another professional accounting body (only). If you missed the insert in BRW, or elsewhere, you can find information at Pathways to Success.

Keeping Things Simple

Friends, I’ve just spent 4.5 hours trying to resolve an issue of minute importance in the overall scheme of things. An issue that is so clearly resolvable in my mind with recourse to common sense that it should have taken minutes to fix. Half a day later, the issue remains unresolved. Why? “Because the manual doesn’t provide for that”.

Well, the manual was written by someone absent of context and not possessing an ability ab initio to think through all angles. I will now spend another few hours (at least) writing letters and making calls to get someone (likely in the senior executive suite – perhaps even at Board level) to think about the problem the right way. In so doing, I will waste more of my time and theirs on the issue. Rest assured, the issue will ultimately be fixed, but at what cost? How often this must happen to you all, and how frustrating it is.

Mindless bureaucracy gobsmacks me – yet it is to be found everywhere. Wasted time, wasted activity, unthinking activity…yadda yadda yadda. How many passwords do you now have for banking and internet access? When was the last time that you called a “help” line and found help? When last did you find a person who took ownership of an issue rather than passing the buck? “Not my problem”, or, “Not my role to find a solution”. Such thinking is all too familiar.

Oftentimes, there is little that a dose of common sense would not resolve, but nary an apothecary to dispense such sense exists in most organisations. Those at the top of the tree often kid themselves that “processes” and “systems” are in place to ensure “procedural fairness and equity”. Poppycock. Such thinking is too frequently an excuse for inaction. Lazy, slothful, inexcusable, inaction.

Dr Ken Henry, Treasury Secretary for the Australian Government, recently went on record as saying that dealing with government departments has become too complex and needs to be simplified. Hole in one Henry! Let’s hope this means that the tax system is about to get a whole lot simpler come December…

In any event, Dr Henry has it right. Here’s a suggestion: have any organisation of size create a new role of “Chief of Common Sense” and let them act as mediator to connect the disconnected dots that (should) lead to simple, rational, logical and effective outcomes. Billions of dollars will be saved – daily. I’m hoping that Scott Adams reads my blog and does a Dilbert on this issue. I’d like Dogbert’s take on it…

Mispricing Risk

Wearing a non-CPA hat, I’ve spent a great deal of time working on looking at macro models of the global economy during the past couple of weeks. This has entailed much research, some rather dull number crunching, and many interesting conversations with regulators and lead players – current and former – in various markets.

I won’t get into the detail of the calculations and the projections here, but what is interesting, I think, is that the global financial crisis (GFC) really boils down to the mispricing of risk. Full-stop.

There were many different products, markets, institutions and people involved in making up the mess (pretty much all of “us” played a role, actually), but not pricing risk properly is the common denominator.

The reason risk was mispriced goes to complexity. For example, one collateralised debt obligation (CDO) contract that I looked at was actually a “CDO cubed” — it was a CDO of CDO’s of CDO’s. Seriously.

I approximated the number of pages that one would have had to read in order to be able to claim that they understood the underlying risk and it numbered in the millions. Obviously, that was an impossible task. In short, no-one understood that CDO – yet it sold well, like many others.

This won’t be revelatory to some, though a colleague who is otherwise well versed in financial matters tells me that such information is “news to him”, but what I find interesting is what this likely means for the accounting profession.

As I see it, the world will either do away with derivatives and other complicated financial structures, or find a better way of dealing with them. I think it unlikely that only simple financial products will be used and sold. Thus, finding a better way to deal with them is the likely outcome.

For some accountants, this will mean that they find opportunity in the rapidly growing field of risk management. It will mean that actuarial-type studies are likely to feature more prominently in the education of many future accountants, or that the profession looks to hire more actuaries. It will mean that the risk analysis and risk management teams of MNCs get beefed up, and that lots of opportunities are created in the field of risk management.

I recall that the best paid graduate from my cohort at Uni was someone who majored in accounting but bundled lots of econometrics and actuarial subjects into the mix. I think that the package on offer (from BHP, if memory serves me well) was, in financial terms, roughly twice that of the next best offer. That was rare for the time, but such job opportunities and placements will be more commonplace in the future provided the world continues to become more complicated, not less.

First year Uni students who are largely financially motivated would do well to “quant-up” – they will surely reap the rewards a few years hence.