Sell your services over the phone using Ether

A week ago I was trading blog posts with David Rachford about accountants marketing their professional services using MySpace. The discussion had resulted in both of us signing up with the mega-popular site in an effort to understand the potential opportunities.

Results are still out on that avenue, but out of the Web 2.0 ether, comes Ether. How it works, according to them, emphasis mine:

We all have something valuable to say. Whether you’re an accountant, a computer expert, a blogger, or a good gossiper, you can earn money selling what you say to others over the phone or through email.

Sounds like an interesting use for the new web. The step-by-step details:

  1. You sign up on the site and set up an Ether phone number.
  2. You set a price for your services, either per the hour or the minute.
  3. You decide when you want to take calls.
  4. Then you market your Ether phone number and people give you a call when they want to pay you for your knowledge.

Sounds pretty cool actually, and although I can’t see myself building a career out of something like this, I could see someone with some basic accounting knowledge (a bookkeeper, perhaps) selling it to those who need the information.

What do you think?

No new international accounting standards effective before 2009

The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) has announced they won’t be issuing any new standards or major amendments to existing standards with effective dates before January 1st, 2009, in order to give companies reporting under the standards a bit of a breather to get their house in order.

Word around the accountant blogosphere has been tentatively in favour of the break. Maybe it’s my impetuous youth, but I’m not. Full speed ahead, as far as I’m concerned. If businesses are having trouble getting their accounting in line with new standards, then they need to hire someone to help them get it done. Business waits for no one, so why must accounting?

First options backdating investigation initiated by SEC

Brocade Communications Systems has become the first company to be formally investigated by the SEC regarding the recent options backdating issue.

According to the SEC’s complaint document, which names three former executives of the company as plaintiffs, from 2000 through 2004 the company inflated net income by understating their options-related expense through fraudulent schemes to backdate options.

Under US GAAP, options granted with an exercise price higher than the current market price did not need to be expensed, but options granted with an exercise price lower than the market price (known as “in the money”, or as I like to call it – instant profits) must be expensd.

So, Brocade is alleged to have granted in the money options to their execs and backdated them to when they were “out of the money”, in order to avoid the expense while allowing the executives to reap instant profits.

I’m going to have a post in the near-future where I outline current Canadian GAAP related to stock-based compensation, so stay tuned for that gem!

What Enron meant to me

Enron burst into flames around January 2002. I was just starting my second semester at Brock University in the esteemed Bachelor of Accounting program when the Houston-based company went down.

What did this mean to a 19-year-old Canadian accounting student with no share holdings and no knowledge of the energy trading giant from Texas? Actually, a lot more than I’d ever have imagined.

From then on, every single accounting or even business class I took touched on Enron in one way or another. I don’t think another class of accounting students got such an in-depth education in various types of off-balance sheet financing.

The business ethics course I took during the balmy summer of 2003 was dominated by Enron. Sure, there were other cases. Eli Lilly and Union Carbide spring to mind. But Enron was dominant. And, as accounting students, Arthur Andersen’s complicity in Enron’s deception was also a focal point in class discussions.

We studied Sarbanes-Oxley, the comprehensive legislation enacted in the wake of Enron and aimed at preventing a repeat, as it occurred. It’s primary focus is on documenting controls. At the time I probably knew more about Sarbanes-Oxley’s requirements than the people it was going to affect the most – management at American companies.

Right around that time the reference in the CICA Handbook to “assuming management’s good faith” was removed, mainly to avoid the legal liability issue that such an assumption may give rise to in the event of another Enron.

Enron changed a lot. Accounting was thrust into the spotlight in terms of further government regulation, the Big Five became the Big Four accounting firms, and nothing will ever be like it was.