Accounting & Business
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. [...]
Accounting news: Accounting & Business
UK News
Bribery up
HMRC offshore actions
Moore Stephens investigated
Moore Stephens’ practice in Northern Ireland is to be investigated by the Accountancy and Actuarial Discipline Board over its audit of the Presbyterian Mutual Society in Belfast, which is in administration. The Treasury reported that PMS offered financial products that it was not authorised to offer. Moore Stephens [...]
Chief auditor: Accounting & Business
Sir Andrew Likierman strongly rejects the suggestion that he is a trouble-shooter. Yet it is undeniable that he has been appointed to address some serious challenges.
The most important of these is that the affable and relaxed Sir Andrew is the first ever chairman of the National Audit Office. The NAO audits the accounts of government [...]
Love and procurement: Accounting & Business
Small firms are prevented by bureaucracy from winning their share of public contracts, a committee of MPs has found. If public bodies better understood how SMEs and micro-enterprises operate they could gain from small firms’ innovation and flexibility, the ACCA backed group concluded.
The House of Commons All Party Parliamentary Small Business Group is chaired by [...]
