Letters: Bonuses are bonkers...!
1 Mar 10
I was astonished to see that the “Bonuses defended…” letter from a CA (name and address withheld) was the winning letter in the February 2010 issue
The current debate about bonuses to bankers is interesting in that the only people in favour of paying the bonuses are the bankers themselves!
The letter states “Bonuses are a mechanism to align costs with revenue – something every business should strive to do”. Surely, if this is the case, how can banks which are loss making afford to pay any bonuses?
Bonuses to bankers should only be paid after the public funding has been repaid and the forgotten shareholders have received a dividend.
If the bankers do not like it, can I respectfully suggest that they seek employment elsewhere. There are plenty of well-qualified people able to step into their shoes.
I bet this won’t win Letter of the Month!
David R Taylor CA, Edinburgh
The politics of auditing
A few years ago, the editor put up a posting “Can auditors really keep it simple?”. One of the key points of the blog entry was that auditors must address the changing shape of the economic world.
Since then, the G20 has risen to be the key forum on the global political economy. Politics is, of course, the environment in which audit takes place. Therefore, understanding the politics that govern audit is important.
In October last year, chartered accountants in Canada arranged a video interview with former Canadian PM Paul Martin to ask him what the G20 could achieve. Mr Martin said that, unless the G20 member countries agreed to peer review of their finances, he held out little hope.
This week the BBC interviewed Mr Martin and he stressed that, at root, the big countries in the global economy did not want to restrict their national competitive ability by signing up to a set of rules, for example on bank regulation. National politics will always try to control audit. But there are moves afoot in the EU to introduce international checks; and an editorial in today’s FT [11 February 2010] says the crisis with Greece “calls bluff on national fiscal independence”.
Ian Jenkins CA, Hamilton, Lanarkshire