Last summer I asked the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales to invest in financial education for young people.
The idea was a £10 million a year flow of funds which clearly and obviously, no never, I would not dip my wick in.
The ICAEW said there was no demand for this; others were doing it, and they did not have the resources. All those claims were obviously wrong.
They still have £148 million of revenues from fines paid by firms that failed the public over the last decade sitting on their balance sheet, and as far as we currently know, they are all available to use for this purpose, which would advance the reputation of accounting considerably and, therefore, be within the scope of its public purpose as defined by its Royal Charter.
They did not, however, want to undertake that public role or accept that responsibility to society.
Now do you see why I wanted to quit? How can you want to be a member of an organisation whose business model is to enrich itself and its members at cost to society at large because of the failure of some of those members to undertake their work to a proper professional standard that meets public need?
Did I resign or was I told to bugger off?
How leaky is the ICAEW?
So he wanted the ICAEW to give him 10 000 000 quid a year?
Around £100 million to be spent over ten years to provide education for young people in the financial skills that they will need when they either leave home or enter the world of work, including:
I’m currently sat working from home awaiting the arrival of a pest control to deal with an ant infestation, and the relevance of this is that I have to admire the ants’ persistence in trying to get into the house and similarly, even though his posts on Iran and Israel establish his supreme evil and the fact he is an anti-semite who ,as he previously posits, would have been quite at home in Dachau, you have to admire the endless grift, particularly when the grifter is someone who has been freeloading arguably since university (40 years!!)
The basics of tax and how it impacts them.
It’s a bold man that displays around 10,000 posts worth of ignorance on a subject and then claims to be an expert.
Types of employment and self-employment
I’d actually be interested to read his take on this. Am presuming people are divided along the lines of ‘rentiers’ and others?
How banking works.
A man who think all financial services activity is ‘gambling’ or ‘speculation’ is setting himslef up as an authority on banking. It’s like Hamas running courses on the Torah
Saving, borrowing, interest rates and related issues.
Renting and mortgages.
How to avoid being conned and online security.
How and when to ask for help, and who from.
These are all topics about which he has displayed complete and utter ignorance. I haven’t held much brief for the ICAEW but in this case they have rightly dismissed him as a fringe crank. Why the mainstream media doesn’t is a mystery.
Issues like budgeting would have been part of this at a more basic level because none of the rest makes sense without it.
Surely people can just create money without cost? Isn’t that the whole point of MMT?
The surprise is that Captain Potato can talk openly about £10M in terms of some weird sexual fantasy.
Maybe he did quit, in a massive hissy fit because they wouldn’t let him loose with a £10m budget?
I’m sure that, under his modest plans, the Director of Financial Education would only take a modest stipend, something along the lines of a university vice-chancellor, so maybe £300k….
Boganboy
I think 10 million as a one-off would sort out his potential financial needs rather than an annual sum but he was suggesting it certainly.
From what the accountants on these boards tell me it is nigh on impossible to get kicked out of the ICAEW so he had no choice but to resign to ‘make an impact’.
Interestingly, just as a blind squirrel stumbles across the odd acorn, he makes a not unreasonable point about financial education being abysmal in schools but surely that’s the job of the education system, rather than professional accountancy, to fix? Perhaps if we transferred the money from Drag Queen storytime to financial education it might be a winner??
How can you want to be a member of an organisation whose business model is to enrich itself and its members at cost to society at large because of the failure of some of those members to undertake their work to a proper professional standard that meets public need?
Several million civil servants and public sector workers, particularly those in the nhs, seem to have no problem with this perceived dilemma. I wonder if the great potato is equally scathing about their self-serving behaviour?
He does have a point. What is the surplus for? What is the *purpose* of the ICAEW? Is it just a professional body to create a barrier to entry and therefore increase earnings of its certified professionals? Is it there to create a CPD money spinner for cronies or does it have an actual point?
In which case would it be served by using the surplus? Not something to force a member’s resignation. Actuaries have been fighting like cats in a sack over governance and only the chap who questioned whether Islam was a good thing has been kicked out.
“What is the *purpose* of the ICAEW? Is it just a professional body to create a barrier to entry and therefore increase earnings of its certified professionals? Is it there to create a CPD money spinner for cronies or does it have an actual point?“
Isn’t its actual point to look after the interests of its members? You could argue that CPD while a nice gravy train also acts as a self-regulation that stops government trying to step in and regulate
BniC, Can’t be much self-regulation, since they let Spud and his ilk in in the first place…
And nothing about the Elyian Sage that can be publicly found suggests that he has ever been “competent” , and should have been let loose on any public finances, or anything derived thereof, past, present, and future.
Having resigned from the ICAEW nearly 20 years ago I was surprised to read just now that the worldwide annual sub was only £450,
Is my memory going or was it formerly a lot more?
While in the profession CPD involved qualified staff wasting several dull and unproductive days each year attending* ludicrously expensive “structured” courses paid for by the practice. That and lying about reading stuff. After I moved back into the real world the cost of paying for such courses and subs plus all the time wasted made it the easiest decision.
* it was an accepted fact that many courses were so awful that attendees were required to sign on the way out as well as when arriving. Failure to do so meant the organisers snitching to your firm. Duplicating a colleagues signature (on a reciprocal basis) was therefore commonplace as the muppets running the courses were either incapable of doing a headcount or simply didn’t care. As a result the actual numbers attending the entire course were as distanced from reality as match day attendance figures at the Emirates.
I agree that financial education for our kids is good, but he’s the last bloke I’d want teaching it.
Grikath
“since they let Spud and his ilk in in the first place”
People join most professional bodies at the stage when mostly they know relatively little (might have 3 or 4 years of basic experience and bright enough to have passed some exams). Whether formally qualified or not, it’s always the subsequent experience and ability that matters/determines the gig.
John
Maybe you were in practice (& paid practising subs) and that’s just the basic membership sub?
PF
I left the profession and moved back into industry nearly 20 years ago. When I found out what the annual sub would cost, having previously had it paid by the partnership, I quickly decided that Institute membership was something I could easily live without. Nothing since then has caused me to question that decision.
Hold on, when I was at school in the ’80s, all this *was* covered in the curriculum in Design For Living.