CPRS Panel for CPA Australia

I am a delinquent blogger.  Very, very delinquent.  That isn’t because I haven’t been doing interesting stuff, it is because I have, and although I tweet regularly, I don’t always get around to making another blog post.

So by way of ‘advance notice’, I am just saying’, I am presenting at a panel for CPA Australia next week on the effect of the CPRS (Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme) on business.  Even though it’s been delayed, the reporting imposte is still going to be there.

Here’s a link to the panel I’m speaking on:

https://www.cpaaustralia.com.au/apps/training/eventdetails.aspx?eventID=5750&eventLocationDateID=18385&sessionID=9917

I’ll post my notes and slides (it’s only 10 minutes) next week, but it promises to be an interesting event.  Some people still argue about the science – for me, that’s as maybe, given that there IS a reporting scheme coming in :).  Eventually.

Suncorp security – check your webserver dudes?

Doing some research for end-of-year tax planning and found this via Google – it’s a Broker Bulletin with the inside knowledge for brokers of Suncorp’s product.

I was rather fascinated that it is indexed by Google, and doesn’t have any security over it, and yet it clearly states that the bulletin is ‘not to be given to applicants or customers’. 

Maybe they should take a look at their web security.  Not that there is very much in it that seems controversial.  Ah well.  Maybe it’s poetic justice given the way my Suncorp shares have tanked.

The author in me

A Rostrum speech I prepared back in 2003 for the Arch Williams.  It didn’t win.

Have you settled down with a good book lately?  I mean, really settled down?  Settled down so that hours pass, your shoulder hurts and your neck is so stiff and sore.  When you promise your significant other that you will read “just one more chapter” before turning the light off and going to sleep – and then checked to be sure that the next chapter is not just a dozen or so pages long, because that would mean you’ve cheated yourself.
I have been there, done that, so many times.  When you have settled down with a good book, the world could explode into big clumpy bits of earth and rock, and you wouldn’t notice.  You would not care a fig.  The book, the author’s ideas and concepts, are all swirled up inside your head, stirring and mixing and educating you, giving you thoughts you couldn’t have come up with on your own.

I have spent a great deal of my life reading books.  All those authors are inside my head, forming one composite author whose influence on me has shaped me for the better.

In today’s fast-paced world of SMS, email, internet pages, and 10-second grabs on television, however, nobody reads properly any more!  People are so busy texting and emailing and surfing they just don’t read a properly constructed book, a book that takes you on a journey and introduces new concepts and ideas.

I believe that you will open up your mind, be better equipped to think, and be better for it, if only you will read!  Tonight, let me show you, through my own experience, why more people need to let an author get inside their head.  And hopefully you will be persuaded enough to let another author inside your head, and pick up a challenging book and read it.

Thinking back through my formative years, the first book that really grabbed my attention, believe it or not, was the Australian nostalgic classic, Cole’s Funny Picture Book.  I was probably about seven or eight.  Lots of pictures, lots of big words – I was hooked.  Today at 33 I can still quote sections from that book – and I haven’t seen it in twenty years.  “Eat live happy food, not dead, dreary food” was one message to make me eat broccoli; in another cartoon a newspaper reported sombrely that “in news just to hand, the world has blown up and everything in it has been killed – more information as it comes to hand”.  Professor Cole is an author right inside my head indeed.  I must have read that book cover to cover a hundred times. 
Later, as a rugged and wild youth of ten, my doting grandparents had me hooked on that classic of boys’ own adventures, “Biggles” – yes, I know, Biggles and his good chum Algy.  This was of course set in a time when there was nothing wrong with having a very good male friend with whom you knocked about for Queen and Country.  Now, Biggles fairly raced around the world in rather fanciful titles such as “Biggles and the Cruise of the Condor”, “Biggles of the Special Air Police”, “Biggles Sweeps the Desert”.  Biggles – he who was always forthright, smart, and cunning, and always won in the end without ever breaking that oh-so-English morality.  I once had an ambition to own all the books in the Biggles series, and was dismayed when I learnt that there were well in excess of a hundred of these books.  But Biggles certainly stimulated my reading, and although it’s quite dated now (fictional Biggles is 102 this year), the author, Captain W E Johns, did manage to teach me various facts about contemporary history, geography, and there was always a strong moral theme to the books.  And besides, Biggles nearly got a girlfriend in one book!

When I was seventeen, it was all Isaac Asimov – science fiction’s Hercules.  Take scientific theories, flesh them out with a bit of boys’ own action adventure (hmmm, a common theme with the books I read), and science looks pretty darn interesting.  “I, Robot”, “Foundation ” – Daneel R Olivaw was Asimov’s favourite character, and fans know that the R stands for Robot.  Asimov can take you floating over the pebbles of Saturn, warping across sub-space, to the depths of Jupiter’s gas clouds and frozen surface, or into the mind of an alien race.  Asimov could ask “The Last Question”, and force your mind to swim across aeons of time and space to contemplate what is indeed the only question of all.  Asimov – stimulated an interest in science for me that continues to this day. 

But then I was off to University, and university students don’t have time for such frivolity; I was bitterly disappointed when I discovered that in all of the University of Queensland’s fifteen libraries, the closest book to fiction was “Business Ethics” – it was the late eighties after all.  But here too, the authors I read have stimulated me, and provided me again with concepts and thoughts I could not have had.  Admittedly, I could do without “Cost Accounting”, but “Transaction Cost Economics” by Oliver E Williamson – now, when you read that, when you truly understand how economics drives the world you live in, you have pushed your mind across the barriers of the petty and small – something clicks inside your head and you are left awestruck by a single glimpse into the author’s mind.  Now, I could try to explain this theory, but you will have to pick up that book and follow the journey that the author set out to demonstrate his ideas and concepts – he does it far better than I.  Let that author into you.
Now, now it’s not all beer and skittles – some books I have read and not agreed with them at all.  But I have read them, considered their arguments, and thought of rational arguments against the author’s point of view.  And such mental exercise is good for the brain, good for the intellect, and good for you. 

Now, as you can probably tell by now, I’m enthusiastic about the books that authors write.  All books (with perhaps the exception of “Cost Accounting”) stimulate the mind and take you on a journey.  Captain W E Johns and Oliver Williamson could not be more different.  You won’t be transported to another world if you read a text message or email.  When you click on a link in a web page, you aren’t following a journey constructed by an author.  No.  As I have shown tonight by laying bare my reading history – Biggles and all – there are many authors inside my head, authors that form a composite whole.  By reading, I have opened up my mind, I am better equipped to think, and I am better for it.  I have read books from beginning to end, in a sitting or over weeks, as laid out by the author. 

So please, accept my challenge.  Build on that author in you, and stretch your mind, go on that journey.  Pick up a book, read it cover to cover.  Spend the precious time thinking through the author’s thoughts.  Let their ideas and concepts swirl and mix inside your head.  Float amongst the space dust, or dissect the economy as a contractual nexus.  You will then come to appreciate the author that is in you, just as I appreciate all the authors that are the author in me.

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What are the AIFRS changes?

Just a note I’ve prepared based upon my PhD project.  You’ll either get it or you won’t.

AIFRS Changes

At the core, AIFRS is made up of two factors:  Auditing Standard changes (ASA’s) and Australian Accounting Standard changes (AASB’s).

Therefore, there are two components impacting upon IT audit methodology:

  • More information to be recorded by the business on the basis of changes to the Australian Accounting Standards, being the Share Register (AASB101 and AASB103), Asset Register (AAS25, AASB3, AASB5, AASB6, AASB102, AASB116, AASB117, AASB119, AASB127, AASB130, AASB131, AASB132, AASB136, AASB137, AASB138, AASB140, AASB141, AASB1023, AASB1038, AASB1049, AASB1050, AASB1051, and AASB1052), and Liabilities Register (AAS 25, AASB2, AASB3, AASB4, AASB 119, AASB130, AASB131, AASB132, AASB137, AASB1004, AASB1050, and AASB1052).  These AASB’s are not definitive.
  • Modifications in the Audit Standards that affect the processes that the auditor should use in considering all of the financial information relating to the formulation of its opinion on the financial statements.

Audit Methodology

  • The project makes direct reference to the need to identify IT Audit methodologies.  When discussed with practitioners, they did not distinguish between audit methodologies and IT audit methodologies. 
  • Accordingly Lynne Gehrke has adopted the Cushing & Loebbecke (1986) approach to the audit methodology.  Although ISACA through its CISA program has an audit methodology that it outlines, there is not really such a thing (so it seems) as a seprate IT audit methodology.  Accordingly, the implications need to be examined upon the audit methodology as a whole.

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Feedback from Facebook, MySpace, YouTube & Flickr

Today I received feedback from the presentation I gave back in October 2008 (!) on the presentation ‘Facebook, MySpace, YouTube & Flickr – managing and leveraging the business impact of social networking sites’.

Again going for that whole transparency thing.

Feedback was very good – technical content rating was a 4 (Very Good) and presentation material rating was a 4 (Very Good).

The average is suspiciously round so it makes me think that not many people completed the evaluation, but there you go.

The presentation is available in an earlier post, but here is the slideshare:

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