Archive for December, 2009
Protecting credit card users from themselves: Belfast Telegraph
First comes the crash and then the suggestions on how to prevent it happening again. To put it another way, the Government and its regulators are busy shutting the stable doors after the horses have already bolted.
The latest proposal for the clean-up of the financial sector focuses on credit cards. There have long been criticisms [...]
Questions of Cash: ‘Why won’t my Barclaycard debt clear?’: The Independent
Q. I’ve not used my Barclaycard for over a year and paid the minimum repayment monthly by direct debit. Yet I am regularly charged £12 for being ‘Over Credit Limit’ and had to pay £100 in July to put my account on an ‘even keel’. Even then, I was charged £12 in August for being [...]
Questions of Cash: ‘Can cards still be cloned?’: The Independent
Q. In Questions of Cash on 24 October you reported that it is possible for a bank to tell from its records whether an original card or a cloned card has been used to make a withdrawal from a cash machine. If this is true, why is the payment allowed to proceed in the first [...]
Targeting regulation: Accounting & Business
What is the correct response to regulatory failure? Is it to strengthen regulation – at higher cost – or to say that regulation doesn’t work, so let’s minimise it?
These are questions relevant to public services, just as much as for financial services. After 12 years of target-setting and a mostly command-and-control approach to public sector [...]
Profile: Michael Parker: Accounting & Business
The view from: Michael Parker FCCA, Chair of King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Q. What are the main finance challenges for NHS bodies over the next five years?
A. To obtain a greater understanding of patient level costing and contribution analysis to ensure we avoid deflationary activity. This is part of evidence-based decision-making that should displace [...]
Accounting news: Accounting & Business
UK News
Vantis executives accused
Two executives of Vantis’s tax divisions have appeared at Highbury Magistrates’ Court, facing charges from HMRC. The charges relate to the aggressive use of Gift Aid to reduce the tax liabilities of clients. The scheme is estimated to have saved famous clients – including sportsmen and musicians – over £100m in [...]
Grossly Distorted Performance: Accounting & Business
Did you hear the joke about the French President who suggested replacing GDP with a measure of national happiness? If you read the British press, you probably did. Around much of the world, though, no one is laughing.
Nicholas Sarkozy was certainly deadly serious setting-up the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress [...]
Profile: Debbie Pert: Accounting & Business
The view from
Debbie Pert FCCA
Q. What challenges do you face?
Balancing restricted resources with the ambitions of our organisation! Our largest customers are local authority social service departments. These are facing tough times, so we must work within existing resources to improve services.
Q. What challenges do you expect over the next five years?
More of the same [...]
The cost of fraud: Accounting & Business
Fraud against the public sector costs hundeds of millions of pounds a year. It is also tying-up about 50,000 publicly-funded homes that could be allocated to families in need, according to the latest Protecting the Public Purse report from the Audit Commission.
As the recession bites even harder on public finances, so the emphasis on tackling [...]
Profile: Derek Elliott: Accounting & Business
The view from: Derek Elliott FCCA, head of the Audit Commission’s Governance and Counter Fraud Practice
Q. What is your progress in countering fraud?
A. Exciting - but worrying. A key aim of the Audit Commission is to raise awareness of risks of fraud and help improve the effectiveness of counter-fraud arrangements in local public bodies. [...]
