This was my first consulting assignment after my exams, i was extremely excited to help and power the company to grow. I thought my experiences and technical skills would be of great help to the company but to my surprise there was something which i have learned from the company.
Here the brief of my experience which i would like to share and would appreciate your comments.
Day 1: Reached the company, the assignment was in progress and i happened to join. Within first few hours by looking the balance sheet of the company i had an idea that it’s a relatively small company and willing to grow, so it was my presumption that there are bound to be loads of accounting issues and i was prepared for it, unaware of the fact of what in store for me.
Day 2: I prepared the assignment schedule and wanted to see the scope of our work, to my surprise there was no such document available at my disposal.
Then I started interacted with my colleague who was a fresh trainee, a nice decent and polite young boy, soon enough I realised that there is lot to learn for this young boy and I remembered my 1st day of training around 3 years ago, and I thought I would help him understand the complex concepts so that he could grasp things, but minutes later something happened which made me in a state of shock, a gentleman came up to me while I was in my cabin busy decoding the accounts of the company and started interacting with me with lot of interest and even I responded with the same excitement. On the first instance I thought he is some newly joined employee of the finance department (may be junior accountant or something) who would like to share his experience, after meeting this gentleman I came to the conclusion that my colleague whom I thought will have to learn a lot was actually in a position to teach this guy as the gentleman who came to me was totally unaware about the accounting basic concepts.
But as there was lots of important things waiting for me I just ignored and was studying the accounts of the company, I had a few queries and to my surprise the same gentleman whom i meet before was before me to help me solve my queries, I was surprised, confused and but I smiled at him politely and after he was over with his explaination “Sir these was just small queries which I had and thanks for your clarification” I said, and he left.
I continued with my work, as I progressed further this time few major doubts which needed to be clarified immediately cropped so I called for the concerned person to kindly help me understand these issues and to my surprise the same gentleman was in front of me ready with the answers, but this time I was puzzled and slowly whispered to my colleagues “who is this great gentleman ever ready and excited to make me understand things” and the answer I got was such that made me still for few minutes, “he is the finance head” said my colleague, OMG it actually took me few minutes to recover for the state of shock to hear about this disaster and I was praying and hoped that the company survives inspire of him being in the driving seat of a very crucial and vital department of the organization.
Finally after careful study of the balance sheet and the profit and loss account of the company I realised that there is no distinction between revenue and capital items, there is no system of fixed assets register, no internal policies have been framed and there did not exist something which we call as internal controls.
These were the few among many findings but some thing more interesting was still waiting to be discovered something much more significant and worth discussing about,
The company was registered under the Companies Act, 1956 and the Auditors of the company gave a unqualified Audit Report.
The tax Auditors report was absolutely clean
The returns were regularly filled with the ROC with no objections from ROC.
After having enlightened with these facts i desperately wanted to meet 2 of the most amazing persons (hero’s in this story)
1. The CMD of the company- for his great leadership which he has in his organization
2. The auditors of the company- for doing such a great job or should I say no job at all.
The larger point which I am trying to make here is are the professionals like us not delivering or is it too common/small to notice.
The company has serious volitions of the companies ACT, INCOME TAX ACT which lead to severe consequences
The concerned auditor has seriously violated Companies Act and CA Regulations Act provisions.
Are these things have become a part of the system and not worth discussing or should we as professionals raise our standards so that we compete with the strongest not by killing the weakest but by being more fit.
Raise the voice, discuss about such cases and let’s be connected and exchange views to help each other.
