Accounting Manager Jobs
The accounting manager’s role has changed dramatically over the past ten years. Once an overseer of transaction processes and financial reporting, today’s accounting manager must be prepared to play a larger role—as planner, leader, communicator, internal consultant and business partner to senior management. Functional expertise still matters, but it isn’t sufficient for excellent performance in today’s business environment.
The "Big Four auditors", listed alphabetically below, are the largest multinational accountancy firms, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
These firms are associations of the partnerships in each country rather than having the classical structure of holding company and subsidiaries, but each has an international 'umbrella' organization for coordination (technically known as a Swiss Verein).
In 2002, Arthur Andersen was convicted (later overturned) of obstruction of justice for shredding documents related to its audit of Enron. Nancy Temple (Andersen Legal Dept.) and David Duncan (Lead Partner for the Enron account) were cited as the responsible managers in this scandal as they had given the order to shred relevant documents. Since the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission does not allow convicted felons to audit public companies, the firm agreed to surrender its licenses and its right to practice before the SEC on August 31, 2002. A plurality of Arthur Andersen joined KPMG in the US and Deloitte & Touche outside of the US. Historically, there had also been groupings referred to as the "Big Six" (Arthur Andersen, plus Coopers & Lybrand before its merger with Price Waterhouse) and the "Big Eight" (Ernst and Young prior to their merger were Ernst & Whinney, and Arthur Young and Deloitte & Touche was formed by the merger of Deloitte, Haskins and Sells with the firm Touche Ross).
The accounting scandals at Enron and other high profile companies in the USA and Europe have had, and continue to have, far-reaching consequences for the accounting industry. Application of International Accounting Standards originating in International Accounting Standards Board headquartered in London and bearing more resemblance to UK than current US practices is often advocated by those who note the relative stability of the UK accounting system (which reformed itself after scandals in the late 1980s and early 1990s).
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