Misconduct at IWK

Posted by & filed under Ethics, Internal control.

Description: Tracy Kitch has been found guilty of fraud over $5,000 for her misuse of a corporate credit card at the IWK Children’s Hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Kitch was formerly the CEO of the well-known institution, and following allegations of misconduct in 2017, she repaid the IWK for personal items charged to the card…. Read more »

Problems at PWC

Posted by & filed under Accounting Careers, Ethics.

Description: Regulators in both Canada and the United States have slapped roughly $1 million in fines on auditing giant PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) for an internal cheating scandal in which 1,200 employees were implicated. Last year, PWC Australia faced a similar problem that resulted in over $600,000 in fines. One certainly hopes that the cheating did not… Read more »

Bring Back Pandemic Premium?

Posted by & filed under Ethics, Managerial Accounting, Student life.

Description: Early in the Covid crisis, many lauded grocery strore chains as they cranked up the salaries of front line employees with “Hero Pay.” But the “Hero Pay” premium has all but disappeared, while at the same time grocery chain profits have generated big bonuses for company executives. This has prompted pressure from various voices… Read more »

Threats to Independence

Posted by & filed under Ethics.

Description: Well, they’ve gone and done it again. That’s three times in a row now that the Province of New Brunswick has gone ahead and appointed its Comptroller as its Auditor General, without the benefit of any cooling-off period. It seems very difficult to understand how this key financial officer in government – in this… Read more »

The Facebook Dilemma

Posted by & filed under Accounting Careers, Ethics.

Description: Last week a lot of the business news was dominated by the story of former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, a whistle-blower who testified before the U.S. Senate regarding Facebook’s alleged choice of profit over user protection. Haugen also had released various documents to the news media, casting her former employer in quite a negative… Read more »

An Expensive Shot

Posted by & filed under Ethics.

Description: Now that was a costly injection: the head of the organization investing your Canada Pension Plan resigned last week after news broke that he had received a Covid-19 vaccine in Dubai. Mark Machin has said this trip to the Middle East was for personal reasons, but the timing of his trip comes with repercussions…. Read more »

Pandemic and Workplace Safety

Posted by & filed under Ethics, Managerial Accounting.

Description: Business has been booming at Amazon, but that’s not all good news for the Amazon employees. Tim Bray, a vice-president in the organization left Amazon this past spring, noting that while white-collar employees have excellent work conditions, things are not so nice on the warehouse floor. Workers have been concerned about a lack of… Read more »

First, Take Wage Subsidy; Second, Pay Dividends

Posted by & filed under Canadian Government, Ethics.

Description: An analysis by CBC of 53 Canadian public companies shows that over half of them have paid out dividends to shareholders while collecting the federal government’s Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS). The point of the CEWS was to help these and other companies to keep their staff working while facing the economic crush of… Read more »

Time for a Code?

Posted by & filed under Ethics.

Description: Dalhousie University professor Sylvain Charlebois argues its time that the big Canadian grocery chains sign-on to an industry code of conduct. He offers this opinion in the light of a move by all the big grocers except Sobeys to place new fees on their suppliers who want access to their store shelves. Charlebois goes… Read more »

WE to Close Shop

Posted by & filed under Ethics.

Description: Much of the summer news featured the controversy of the federal government’s decision to award a sole-source contract for $43.5 million to the WE charitable group to deliver a student grant program. The backlash over the controversy has cost WE major sponsors such as Telus, RBC, and Virgin Atlantic. All this financial hit has… Read more »