Following is a description of a typical day as experienced by a tax staff professional at a Big Four firm.
8:00 a.m.: I like to get in a little earlier than others (most other people in the office get in around 9:00). This gives me a chance to check e-mail and voice mail, take care of administrative tasks, check my open items from the previous day and make a general plan for my day. If things are slow, this is the time I read The Wall Street Journal or other periodicals for news regarding my clients.
9:00 a.m.: The office is jumping and the phone calls are starting to come in. At this time, I often have meetings with my manager and senior to discuss work in progress. These meetings will usually touch on the following: list of open (i.e., unfinished) items on tax returns, general tax matters for clients, tax technical issues requiring further research, and client management issues and administration. My manager will generally prioritize these items and the senior and I will form a plan of attack.
10:00 a.m.: As the tax staff, I'll most likely address the tax return open items and perform any research on technical tax issues; the senior will deal more often with general tax matters and client relationship items. Preparing a corporate tax return is relatively straightforward. While corporate tax returns can be quite complex, you can more or less prepare a corporate return line-byline, same as an individual return.
The primary challenge in preparing a corporate return is ensuring that you have complete, full and accurate information from the client. This is more daunting than it sounds. Information necessary to complete a tax return can come from numerous sources within a company, not just the accounting and tax departments. The larger the company, the more potentially difficult it is to get all of your information. As a result, most of the hours I bill on tax return preparation projects are spent not on actually preparing the return, but on tracking down all of the necessary information. I'll generally put together an information request that, after a brief review by the manager, I will e-mail or fax to the client.
Tax research is generally more straightforward than tax return preparation. The firm has every possible tax research tool and source, from print to electronic to online to human. The ironic thing is that most of the research items you get at this level are ones for which answers are already known. Managers give you these research items pretty much knowing what the likely outcomes will be: you just confirm the suspicion with actual Internal Revenue Code sources, tax court cases or other citations. Sometimes you'll get a unique and challenging assignment, but the new topics are usually researched by groups within the firm that specialize in that technical area.
In any case, these activities could easily take up the rest of my day, depending on how cooperative the client is or how difficult the information is to get.
1:00 p.m.: Lunch.
2:00 p.m.: Another e-mail and voice mail check, after which I'll resume my activities from the morning. At this point, I probably will have spent a good amount of time on the phone with client personnel trying to track down information. In the best-case scenario, the client will have sent me back my information request with at least some information; realistically, the information request will get back to me no earlier than two or three days after I send it.
I'll most likely spend some time making sure that the information we do have is correctly entered into the tax preparation software our firm uses. And at this point, I'll hopefully have some answers or information regarding the research I performed on the tax issues. If so, I'll try to schedule some time with my senior and/or manager later this afternoon to discuss my findings. Throughout the day, I'll be gathering and organizing my work papers for inclusion in the client's file.
4:00 p.m.: If all goes well, I'm having a brief meeting with my senior and/or manager discussing the research I performed. This discussion will hammer out how this issue could affect the tax return. Often, this discussion will result in my drafting of a technical memorandum that outlines the issue and our findings. These memos are pretty interesting because they represent more strategic and interpretive thought than plugging numbers into a tax return. The research and memos feel like the real meat of tax work.
6:00 p.m.: Finishing touches on my draft memo (the manager always has modifications), organizing my work papers, checking off my open items for tomorrow, and preparing my timesheet for the day. This will all probably take me 30-40 minutes, and then I'm off home. Incidentally, I should note that I'm usually working on multiple tax returns and other projects at one time. So there's usually a lot of juggling going on, putting a premium on my time management and organizational skills. And if this was busy season, my leaving time wouldn't be anywhere near 6:00 p.m. - it'd probably be closer to 11:00 p.m.
The typical public accounting project cycle
Young accounting staffers with dreams of making boardroom presentations to clients should postpone those dreams for a while. Typically, work for young staffers remains administrative. Partners and senior managers handle the delivery of the "pitch" to clients and prospective clients.
Once a firm lands a client, the partners of the firm will form an engagement team for that particular job. Industry experience and schedule availability are the main criteria for selection for a particular engagement. Depending on the length and complexity of an assignment, multiple managers and a senior may be selected to complete the work.
During the initial stage of the work, a project is usually referred to as a "first time through," and firms will expend extra effort to understand a client's business and offer them improvement points on their current work processes. This step is especially interesting for the younger professionals, since it gives them much more of a chance to dissect a company's operations and gain a better understanding of how the work products of different departments flow together. This is the stage when accountants and consultants produce books outlining the client's procedures. This documentation is used in subsequent years and only updated for any changes that may have taken place in the company's operations. These briefing documents reduce the workload on subsequent jobs for recurring clients.
The analytical techniques used during an audit don't differ in their application, but the extent of their application will depend on how knowledgeable an auditor is about a particular client's operations. During a first-time audit, an accountant will employ many more statistical tests.
The culmination of the audit process usually results in the issuance of an audit opinion on a client's financial statements. The auditors will also make a presentation to the audit committee of the company's board of directors. During this meeting, the opinion will be presented, along with any management recommendations the public accounting firm has. Usually, only the manager and partners attend such meetings, although it is not unusual for very experienced seniors to attend on occasion. In reality, the partners usually use the meeting as a chance to highlight other potential services that they could be selling a company. Additionally, they enjoy the chance to market to board members who may work for other corporations.