After scooping the Jeremy Newman website the other day, here's another site you might not have seen, courtesy of the excellent web searching skills of my colleague Kevin Reed.

It's the official website of none other than the Hundred Group, the organisation that represents FTSE100 finance directors. It's fair to say that, despite their slightly elusive nature, this is a body with some impact in government and in the sector more broadly.

You can find their report on the Total Tax Contribution Framework on there, as well as planned meetings with Ed Balls and information on the group as a whole. It's a real find.

I'd also say it's a tribute to the group's emerging transparency. Except it's impossible to find unless you look as hard as we did. I challenge you to find it on Google.

Who knows - perhaps if I link to it lots of times people will be able to find it more easily.

January 19, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Right, back to tax. Mentioning Jeremy Newman's blog just now made me remember something I'd been meaning to blog about: the lack of blogs by senior tax advisers.

Jeremy's blog is worth a look - and it is perhaps unsurprising that BDO should be the first to launch their leader forth in this way given the huge push they have at the moment to take on the Big Four.

I wonder how it works for BDO from a marketing perspective. Blogs reach people in a different way to other kinds of marketing, I think. The networks and communities they spawn are large and often give you unexpected insights into who is interested in what you're doing.

What surprises me is that tax advisers don't use them to get their views across. Given the number of press releases we get from all the firms, why don't advisers use blogs to highlight issues and give the views that they are sending out anyway? It's another platform, and you're less dependent on a journalist actually choosing to use your quote to reach an audience.

For my part, I'd like to see blogs by the following people: Bill Dodwell, the Deloitte corporate tax partner; Mike Warburton and Paddy Behan from Grant Thornton; John Whiting, Stephen Coleclough and Peter Cussons from PwC; Chris Morgan at KPMG; and Chris Sanger at E&Y.

All of them are well informed about what is going on and all of them have good gossip to pass on. So if the relevant marketing people/decision makers at those firms could, er, sort them out with blogs, I'd be very grateful.

The other person whose blog would be good fun is Dave Hartnett, HMRC's effective policy supremo.

Perhaps things he said on the blog could be given the status of law. That would not only wind people up. It would also dramatically shorten all that tedious process of going through parliament to set tax law.

January 17, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

I've been 'tagged' by Dennis Howlett. Well, actually, it happened before Christmas, but holidays and ceaseless scandals to write about (some people do tell me that's all I ever write about) have kept me too busy to respond.

As far as I can tell the idea is to tell you five things about me you might not know, and then demand the same from five more people! So here goes.

1) I am not actually the 'tax hack' any longer. I am the news editor. Nicholas Neveling now covers corporate tax for AA, and Kevin Reed covers personal tax. I still write a bit about tax, and still get worked up enough about it at times to write furious and unbalanced columns and posts. As you'll be aware...

2) I am a bit of a 'Germanophile'. I've been learning German for several years, and last year went on a little tour of Germany in the Summer.

3) I come from a family of journalists. My dad's a journalist, my brother is, my mum worked as a foreign correspondent in South America in the 1970s, my great uncle used to write for the Express, and my aunt broke the mould by, er, working in telly.

4) I am not an accountant. Surprising to some, who insist on thinking that reporters on Accountancy Age have accounting qualifications. None of us do, which goes some way to explaining all those silly errors you see in the magazine.

5) There is an accountant in the family. Not saying who, or the flow of exciting scoops I get from this person might dry up...

Who would I like to find out more about? Well, let's go for the following

Jeremy Newman

Richard Murphy (I don't think he has done this yet, despite, like me, being tagged by Dennis)

Andrew Goodall

Damian Wild

TS

January 17, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Self-referential and slightly off topic this may be, but it's a question worth asking.

Are Big Four staff at all cheesed off that their pay has gone up by only a fraction of that of their bosses this year? Damian Wild, Accountancy Age's editor-in-chief, looks at the numbers in his column in the magazine this week. Damian's point is slightly different, but it's worth asking this question too.

E&Y's profit per partner went up by 27% in the last financial year. KPMG profits per partner were up 14%. The same figures for Deloitte and PwC were 8% and an incredible 42% respectively.

So now to the employees, the 'people' of which the firms speak so highly and bang on about needing to find and retain.

Average staff remuneration was up 6% at E&Y, 1% at KPMG (with £80m of bonuses chucked in too, I think), 5% at Deloitte and 2.2% at PwC. Considerably smaller increases, suggesting that the bumper, some might say, excess profits of the Sarbox/IFRS era, have generally gone to the 2,000 or so partners who run the nation's major accountancy firms. Perhaps I've got these numbers wrong and someone more versed in Big Four accounts can correct me.

Of course, the normal arguments apply. Partners take the risk (though how great those risks are may be open to debate), so they get the reward. Likewise, Big Four staff aren't exactly on the bottom rung of the opportunity and earnings ladder.

But it's worth bearing the numbers in mind, at least, when the Big Four talk about their 'people' agendas. Just exactly which people do they mean, you may wonder?

January 4, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

Just to show what a thrusting, modern and high-tech department HM Revenue & Customs is (stick with me), it might be worth noting that it has ditched the print version of the business brief.

This is the document that advises taxpayers of the way in which the taxman is interpreting various tax issues, and the best way to consider them. It often contains some interesting stories from a journalistic point of view and I presume must also be of use to advisers generally.

The last brief of last year notifies reaaders of the change. It will henceforth be a purely online publication.

Is this the end of an era? Will advisers lament the change and complain? Are there some people who don't like reading things online who'd rather have the print edition? I'd ask them to leave their comments here, of course, but if they really feel that strongly, I doubt they'll be reading this...

Another stage, perhaps, in the gradual disenfranchisement of the technologically challenged.

January 3, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)