Accounting for a Detoured Economist

Is this supposed to be some sort of intelligent comment on the status of sexism in the American cpa job market? If it is it went straight over my head. This is not evidence of sexism. It is evidence of a new trend of female domination which will result in a dominant female presence in management in around 20 years as all of those females get their years of experience under their belt and move to positions of management.

PS - I would have just commented in the post, but Telberg’s spam filter software would not recognize that I was typing in the proper image text. Oh well.

Well it has been a while since I have written here. To be frank, it has been a while since I have even come to this site. I have fallen into a rut. Now a rut isn’t always a bad thing…in the short run. Life has consisted of the following….

1. Waking up
2. Playing with my lovely 1.5 year old daughter
3. Going to work
4. Working through lunch (if at all possible, pesky social events often get in the way)
5. Driving home at a devils pace.
6. Playing with my lovely daughter.
7. Dinner, chores, bedtime for Maya
8. Spend time with my wife
9. Watch a little boob-tube to wind down from the day
10. Go to bed
11. Repeat

I used to look forward to blog posts, but ever since I moved to North Carolina the activity has lost its luster. Strange…I am enjoying myself as I write this…but the activity is no longer a draw.

Work has been consuming lately. Going to a new firm is more challenging then I expected. As an ‘experienced hire’ I am expected to know what I am doing, and for the most part that is true. However, there are a plethora of landmines that I walk into daily that slow my productivity down compared to my coworkers (I am at a senior auditor level sniffing a manager position, but being held back by my lack of certification — AHHHHHHHHHHH!). Planning for clients with a risk based approach has proven to be difficult for me. I have been assigned to clients I do not know in industries I am not familiar with. How the hell do I know what the industry and client risks of material misstatements are…I am intelligent and can give a good guess, but I guess the idea of guessing at it seems wrong to me. During the June 30 year ends I was thrown into clients in industries I am familiar with but did not plan and walked into the middle of audits that I was expected to close. Let me tell you what a pain in the ass that was.

On top of all of this I am having to learn a new audit software package, new standards that change audits to a more risk based approach (I was used to a substantive overkill audit method) and a lack of knowing what a GP3 is (that is what my coworkers call the fraud assessment workpapers…even though they are now labeled something else in the audit workpapers). I went from comfortably knowing what I was doing and being the go to guy for questions to being a average auditor that barely treads water most days. A humbling experience, to say the least of the situation.

Also I am starting to feel my age. There is a partner at my firm that is just a year or two older than me. Fuck! It is hard to feel competent when I am not even certified and that guy is pulling in a fat paycheck. Now to be fair to myself he went straight from high school to an accounting degree to a job at a firm with no detours. Whereas I went straight from high school to farting off for years to a community college to two other colleges to an economics and statistics degree path to a PhD in economics to a PhD dropout to a what-the-hell-do-I-do-now career path to finding auditing. But still…fuck! If I was disciplined and had focus and drive from an early age where could I be right now?

Talk about a gut check. I am beginning to find my stride at the new job so the pain of the last six months is subsiding. I am also to the point where I will have enough credits in accounting to take the damn certification test (which means I still have to take MORE college accounting courses-FUCK! [Why can’t I take the test without 30 units of accounting coursework…if I can pass the exam without that bureaucratic obstacle why would I be less then qualified to practice as a CPA?]). I may write more in the near future…Maybe not. RSS me and find out.

Ta-Ta.