Our shock story this week (click here) is that the recession has provided the opportunity to see package tours to become a bankrupt or ‘bankrupt...
View articleWe now have our first insight into the way the recession is affecting the Big Four accounting firms. Deloitte today reveals that gross revenues are 2%...
View articleReports today suggest the taxman is terrified of hundreds of claims appearing at the High Court seeking compound interest on over-charged VAT (click h...
View articleYou couldn’t make it up. The Office of Fair Trading – the body that regulates trade, has found its own internal fraud (click here). Nasty....
View articleFigures from HM Revenue and Customs show that the sum deferred in tax payments by the Business Payment Support Service has now topped £3bn (click here...
View articleNow here’s one of my all time favourite quotes from an accountant. It comes from the bluff and outspoken Peter Hargreaves (click here), joint fo...
View articleThe Institute of Directors seems to have discovered a nice line in counter-intuitive, slightly bizarre thinking (click here). If you want to beat the ...
View articleBDO Stoy Hayward has demonstrated this week that partners in accountancy firms are not immune from the recession. I don’t mean that in a glib wa...
View articleThere are many different measures of how difficult economic circumstances have become. Unemployment, house prices, inflation, the inter bank lending r...
View articleOnce a charity could build something or buy a piece of property and not pay any VAT. But not for much longer because has decided in its infinite wisdo...
View articleOur Top 50 survey of 2009 is out and makes for slightly alarming news. Of the biggest 50 firms, 39 have seen their growth rates shrink or go into nega...
View articleAs little as 1p in the pound, if there’s a following wind. That’s all that some creditors are getting from bankrupt debtors at the moment....
View articleThey must be wondering when it will stop, but the Daily Telegraph shows no sign that it is letting up. Yesterday we had revelations that ministers cla...
View articleThat’s a slightly provocative headline I’ll admit, but the Financial Reporting Council has a new chief executive (not starting until Novem...
View articleSo Hazel Blears, communities secretary is to pay about £13,000 in capital gains tax on the sale of her second home. As many readers of this site have ...
View articleThe leaking pipe under the tennis court, the wisteria on the chimney, the antique chairs, the gardeners, flipping second homes, no CGT on the sale of ...
View articleWhere do I stand on the Budget and Alistair Darling? Here’s some thoughts. He was calm, composed, he did not look overly flustered. There was no...
View articleI cannot help but love some of the fantasy that goes into the Budget book each year. This year’s is a case in point. In case you hadn’t he...
View articlethe word is that small business will not benefit overly from the Budget making this crisis moment for Alistair Darlin a missed opportunity. Loss carry...
View articleApparently, and according to research from a couple of Big Four firms, the feared avalanche of ’emphasis of matter’ paragraphs – sta...
View articleThe number of accountants joining the dole queue has grown by 142%. That’s a shocking statistic that should have working accountants everywhere ...
View articleThe collapse of New Century, the giant sub-prime mortgage company that collapsed in the US in 2007 has come back to haunt its auditors. New Century wa...
View articleReports this morning suggest that April’s Budget will not be used to launch a second fiscal stimulus (large scale tax cuts). Mervyn King has iss...
View articleJames Davis, according to reports, is going to cooperate with federal authorities in the US despite having initially taken the ‘fifth’ to ...
View articleActually, the headline to this blog is not entirely true. The FSA didn’t say that. But I did want to raise an issue about the report from Adair ...
View articleBack in Sept 2007 I wrote this about Tidjane Thiam, the then newly appointed FD of the Pru, the man with, perhaps, the most remarkable CV in the City....
View articleWanted to follow up on Damian Wild’s observations on KPMG’s invitation to staff to switch to a four day week. We now know that something l...
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