Accounting for a Detoured Economist

Krupo has been on a hot streak over the last few weeks. I know this because I find myself dead tired in my hotel room fighting the urge to write posts in response to his but not able to muster the grey matter to write anything more than jibberish. Good job Krupo.

Update: Have you read a good post on accounting/audit that hasn’t had a comment from Krupo at the bottom? I’m having trouble thinking of one. Where do you get all the free time Krupo?

Well I finally have some free time and thought that there is no better use of free time then to write inane posts on a blog read by a small niche of the small niche of accountants that read blogs to begin with. Hi. My wife, daughter, and I had enough of the San Francisco Bay Area and its $800,000 fixer-0upper starter houses and decided that if we ever wanted a house we had better move to an area in the US that we could afford to buy a starter house.

The search was difficult because we had soo many requirements for a place we would consider moving. After living in Ithaca, New York for a while we knew we didn’t want to live anywhere that had snow for more then a few weeks a year, which cut out more then half of the country. The demographics had to be right, we prefer living in tech savvy towns with educated population demographics, low crime and good schools. Furthermore, salary scales had to be very similar to the Bay Area and housing had to be at least half of the price. With those criteria in mind we narrowed our choices to Raleigh, North Carolina and Austin, Texas…both places I had considered attending graduate school a few years ago.

Since the wife didn’t want to live in Texas North Carolina became the sole entry on the list. So a couple of months ago we flew out so that I could test the job market and we could get a feel for the city. The trip was a raging success. With three job offers in four interviews the job situation looked promising. We decided that living in a suburb of Raleigh (Cary, NC) would be desirable and found a house in one day…made an offer, and as of the end of June we have become proud North Carolinians.

The last box was unpacked yesterday and I can now commute to work without the help of a GPS device so posting will become a bit more regular. I hope all is well with you. TTYL.

My family is moving to the Raleigh area of North Carolina from the San Francisco Bay Area. I have accepted a job as a senior auditor in Raleigh and we are in the final stages of buying a house (inspection, closing escrow, etc.). Needless to say life is traveling at a speed faster than is comfortable for anything but a short period of time.

We are moving to North Carolina due to the substantial increase in quality of life and standard of living we could achieve from the move. An entry level single family home in a half-way decent neighborhood in the bay area hovers around $650,000 while a comparable home in Raleigh is less then $200,000. All the while I actually received an increase in salary to move! Needless to say my wife and I jumped at the chance…Laura’s parents, who currently live a few miles away, are going to need a few months to accept the decision…apparently taking a grandchild thousands of miles away can be a traumatic experience.

We will be driving across country on June 20th and will sign the purchase paperwork on June 27th. So don’t expect many posts for the next month. With packing and all the extraneous chores that come from a cross-country move I anticipate very little free-time to blog, or relax.

I have noticed that many of the audit blogs have been really slow lately. This would be an optimal opportunity for an up and coming blogger to collect readers with demand far exceeding supply. If you want some readers, email me at csilvey@gmail.com and I will post a link and your RSS feed.

Just got back from North Carolina where I had a number of job interviews, my wife and I have made an offer on a house, and we spent some time on the coast. At work we are also at the height of interim work and I have a final in cost accounting on Thursday, so its easy to see why production at Accounting for a Detoured Economist has been low lately. Talk at ya soon.

I have stepped away from taxes and back into the worlkd of audit. On my first job I actually caught someone lying to me and creating documents, that should have been created and signed months ago. If you have ever worked as an auditor then you know the feeling of being lied to but not being able to prove it. Well last week I got that feeling and was able to create an air-tight case using time stamps and other evidence to prove my suspicion, I felt like an audit stud…if such a thing exists. I wish I could write more about the particulars…but as we all know the good war stories can’t be blogged about. DAMN!

In other news I ran across a post in LiveJournal by a guy named Matt T who was attempting to describe the specioes known as auditors. He wrote a pretty good description including gems like

Should the auditor begin to behave aggressively towards you, asking what proportion of your contingent liabilities you consider probable, the best advice is to shout ‘Enron!’ and run very fast in the opposite direction. This will make the auditor in question shrivel up and die.

and…

An audit team typically changes its hunting ground every couple of weeks. Hunting grounds normally take the form of offices, but may also include factories, shops, schools and hyperspace. Any place of work is a potential source of nourishment to the paper-hungry auditor. All audit teams have a leader, who runs ahead of the pack in search of an audit trail. Should he find something suspicious, for example a file that has not been organised in alphabetical order, he will begin baying to attract the attention of the rest of the pack. Once the pack have a sniff of the scent, they are released upon the unsuspecting company, and tear around the offices of the internal accounts department, hunting out similar transgressions. When they find another offending item, they will let out a charecteristic whoop of delight, and fall upon the filing cabinet, tearing the paperwork to shreds with their bare teeth in their eagerness to devour it.

and…

Audit packs have their own dens, known as home offices. The pack visits the office on average once a month, in order to refuel on stationery. Auditors can survive several days and nights without water, sex or sunlight but are liable to fall seriously ill if deprived of paper clips and yellow post-its.

I encourage you to read the whole post here.

Wise Bread has recently posted 20 amazing, outrageous and just plain weird tax deductions that people have attempted to write-off on their taxes (sometimes successfully too). Number 10 reminded me of my recent post on tax-free-interest in which strange places are considered as tax free municipalities. Apparently there are equally confusing laws when it comes to writing off convention visits…England…NO…Honduras…YES!

10 - A Trip to Bermuda

I love this one. I have to find a way to do it. ANY business convention held in Bermuda can be written off without even showing there was a special reason to hold your business meeting in paradise. And it’s not the only place. Barbados, Costa Rica, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, Canada, Mexico and all U.S. possessions also fall into this special tax treatment. But outside the U.S. is a different story. I guess I can’t hold a board meeting in England so I can go see my folks then

Canada made the list…hmmm…hey Krupo and Neil this is just further proof of Canada’s status as a US enclave possession. The only question now is whether the whole territory should be the 51st state, or if we should admit the 10 provinces and 3 territories separately. We’ll leave the trouble-makers in Quebec for the French to conquer.

hehehe…I said the French would conquer another government….funny! You all have heard of the Google-bomb of ‘french military victories’ haven’t you? Unfortunately Google finally eliminated the result…you can find a copy of it here.

I had an honorable mention in the twelve blogs of Christmas over at Tickmarks. Cool. Thanks.

I have updated my links on the sidebar. Take a click.

It took me a bit of time to get comments on my last blog. Happily Dennis Howlett at AccMan Pro Blog was kind enough to stop by my infinitesimal attempt at adding to the conversation. Thanks Dennis.