Segundo este endereço, este é o símbolo internacional do casamento.
23 julho 2007
Restos a Pagar e Lei de Responsabilidade Fiscal
Estados e municípios usam restos a pagar para contornar rigidez da LRF
Valor Econômico - 23/07/2007
As finanças de Estados e municípios mostram evolução razoável desde o começo da década, considerando indicadores como a relação entre a dívida consolidada líquida e a receita corrente líquida e a proporção com pessoal do Executivo e a receita. Entre os cinco maiores Estados, apenas o Rio Grande do Sul mostra uma relação dívida/receita acima do teto de 200% definido pela Lei de Responsabilidade Fiscal (LRF) - em 2006, o percentual ficou em 253,6%, mas ele está em queda. Entre os cinco maiores municípios, apenas São Paulo tem o indicador superior ao máximo de 120% - 196,6% no ano passado, mas também em declínio.Uma análise restrita a esses números indica uma situação fiscal positiva. Mas, se depois da entrada em vigor da LRF houve de fato maior austeridade na condução das contas públicas por governadores e prefeitos, também é verdade que esses indicadores não captam plenamente a situação fiscal dos governos, avaliam economistas como José Roberto Afonso e Beatriz Meirelles.
Há um uso cada vez mais freqüente, segundo eles, de um expediente que consiste em assumir dívidas diretamente com fornecedores, empreiteiros ou mesmo o Instituto Nacional do Seguro Social (INSS). "No fim do ano, muitas das despesas restam a pagar para o ano seguinte, mas em valores que superam a casa dos bilhões", escrevem eles, em estudo que conta também com a colaboração de Kleber Castro. Nos restos a pagar se concentram despesas referentes a exercícios fiscais de anos anteriores. No Rio Grande do Sul, por exemplo, o total de restos a pagar cresceu de R$ 1,940 bilhão em 2002 para R$ 3,477 bilhões em 2006, uma alta de 79%, já descontada a inflação. Em São Paulo, o aumento foi de 33,3%, para R$ 7,049 bilhões, e em Minas Gerais, de 29%, para R$ 4,829 bilhões.Para eles, um dos sinais de que a chamada "contabilidade criativa" encobre muitas vezes a verdadeira situação fiscal dos Estados é que, ao tomarem posse no começo do ano, vários governadores "logo adotaram medidas severas para o controle das contas públicas". Os economistas chamam a atenção para a situação do Estado do Rio de Janeiro: em 2006, os gastos com pessoal do Executivo equivaliam a apenas 27,5% da receita, bem abaixo do limite de 49% definido pela LRF. Esse número, isoladamente, indica um quadro que não explica o que fez o governador Sérgio Cabral (PMDB) ao assumir o cargo no começo do ano. Ele promoveu a contenção de despesas com viagens e celulares, cortes de 30% de cargos comissionados e auditoria na folha de pagamento.Segundo eles, no paraíso da contabilidade criativa, "ora somem dos gastos com pessoal os inativos, de um poder ou de todo o governo, ora são contados como se fossem serviços, ora desaparece a parcela do Imposto de Renda retido dos servidores, ora a dívida ativa vira crédito líquido e certo".Beatriz considera, porém, que a situação de Estados e municípios ficou de fato mais saudável depois da LRF. Questões como a do aumento dos restos a pagar acabam por maquiar um pouco a situação real, mas não a ponto de se dizer que não houve melhoras, diz ela. O analista Alex Agostini, da Austin Rating, também avalia que a LRF tem sido fundamental para a evolução positiva dos indicadores fiscais de Estados e municípios. "Ela diminui muito o espaço para governos populistas." A Austin faz a classificação de risco dos quatro principais Estados (SP, MG, RJ e RS) e das respectivas capitais, conferindo o grau de investimento (ou seja, com baixa probabilidade de dar calote) a todos eles, com exceção do Rio Grande do Sul, que possui uma relação dívida/receita muito elevada, além de ter uma economia que sofreu bastante nos últimos anos, em função de problemas como a valorização do câmbio.O especialista em contas públicas Amir Khair vê uma situação fiscal razoável de Estados e municípios, mas faz algumas observações. Ele lembra que, para desinflar gastos com pessoal, alguns Estados e prefeituras elevaram as despesas com terceirização. Isso facilita a obtenção de bons indicadores em relação aos gastos com funcionalismo. Khair lembra que a arrecadação cresceu com força nos últimos anos, também no âmbito estadual e no municipal. Para ajudar, o Índice Geral de Preços - Disponibilidade Interna (IGP-DI), que corrige as dívidas de Estados e municípios com a União, tem registrado variações muito modestas. A combinação de arrecadação em alta e o IGP-DI baixo contribuíram para o tombo de relações dívida/receita como a do município de São Paulo, que caiu de 246,5% em 2004 para 196,6% em 2006. Em Curitiba, a relação atingiu 2,42% no fim de 2006.Khair chama a atenção ainda para o que considera o "escândalo dos precatórios", as dívidas judiciais que os governos têm de pagar, mas o fazem a um ritmo muito lento. Graças a uma proposta de emenda constitucional - a PEC 12 -, o calote desses débitos poderá ser consagrado, acusa ele, porque ela possibilitará o parcelamento dos débitos por prazos muito longos. Para os credores, uma péssima notícia. Para Estados e municípios, porém, um alívio fiscal.
Valor Econômico - 23/07/2007
As finanças de Estados e municípios mostram evolução razoável desde o começo da década, considerando indicadores como a relação entre a dívida consolidada líquida e a receita corrente líquida e a proporção com pessoal do Executivo e a receita. Entre os cinco maiores Estados, apenas o Rio Grande do Sul mostra uma relação dívida/receita acima do teto de 200% definido pela Lei de Responsabilidade Fiscal (LRF) - em 2006, o percentual ficou em 253,6%, mas ele está em queda. Entre os cinco maiores municípios, apenas São Paulo tem o indicador superior ao máximo de 120% - 196,6% no ano passado, mas também em declínio.Uma análise restrita a esses números indica uma situação fiscal positiva. Mas, se depois da entrada em vigor da LRF houve de fato maior austeridade na condução das contas públicas por governadores e prefeitos, também é verdade que esses indicadores não captam plenamente a situação fiscal dos governos, avaliam economistas como José Roberto Afonso e Beatriz Meirelles.
Há um uso cada vez mais freqüente, segundo eles, de um expediente que consiste em assumir dívidas diretamente com fornecedores, empreiteiros ou mesmo o Instituto Nacional do Seguro Social (INSS). "No fim do ano, muitas das despesas restam a pagar para o ano seguinte, mas em valores que superam a casa dos bilhões", escrevem eles, em estudo que conta também com a colaboração de Kleber Castro. Nos restos a pagar se concentram despesas referentes a exercícios fiscais de anos anteriores. No Rio Grande do Sul, por exemplo, o total de restos a pagar cresceu de R$ 1,940 bilhão em 2002 para R$ 3,477 bilhões em 2006, uma alta de 79%, já descontada a inflação. Em São Paulo, o aumento foi de 33,3%, para R$ 7,049 bilhões, e em Minas Gerais, de 29%, para R$ 4,829 bilhões.Para eles, um dos sinais de que a chamada "contabilidade criativa" encobre muitas vezes a verdadeira situação fiscal dos Estados é que, ao tomarem posse no começo do ano, vários governadores "logo adotaram medidas severas para o controle das contas públicas". Os economistas chamam a atenção para a situação do Estado do Rio de Janeiro: em 2006, os gastos com pessoal do Executivo equivaliam a apenas 27,5% da receita, bem abaixo do limite de 49% definido pela LRF. Esse número, isoladamente, indica um quadro que não explica o que fez o governador Sérgio Cabral (PMDB) ao assumir o cargo no começo do ano. Ele promoveu a contenção de despesas com viagens e celulares, cortes de 30% de cargos comissionados e auditoria na folha de pagamento.Segundo eles, no paraíso da contabilidade criativa, "ora somem dos gastos com pessoal os inativos, de um poder ou de todo o governo, ora são contados como se fossem serviços, ora desaparece a parcela do Imposto de Renda retido dos servidores, ora a dívida ativa vira crédito líquido e certo".Beatriz considera, porém, que a situação de Estados e municípios ficou de fato mais saudável depois da LRF. Questões como a do aumento dos restos a pagar acabam por maquiar um pouco a situação real, mas não a ponto de se dizer que não houve melhoras, diz ela. O analista Alex Agostini, da Austin Rating, também avalia que a LRF tem sido fundamental para a evolução positiva dos indicadores fiscais de Estados e municípios. "Ela diminui muito o espaço para governos populistas." A Austin faz a classificação de risco dos quatro principais Estados (SP, MG, RJ e RS) e das respectivas capitais, conferindo o grau de investimento (ou seja, com baixa probabilidade de dar calote) a todos eles, com exceção do Rio Grande do Sul, que possui uma relação dívida/receita muito elevada, além de ter uma economia que sofreu bastante nos últimos anos, em função de problemas como a valorização do câmbio.O especialista em contas públicas Amir Khair vê uma situação fiscal razoável de Estados e municípios, mas faz algumas observações. Ele lembra que, para desinflar gastos com pessoal, alguns Estados e prefeituras elevaram as despesas com terceirização. Isso facilita a obtenção de bons indicadores em relação aos gastos com funcionalismo. Khair lembra que a arrecadação cresceu com força nos últimos anos, também no âmbito estadual e no municipal. Para ajudar, o Índice Geral de Preços - Disponibilidade Interna (IGP-DI), que corrige as dívidas de Estados e municípios com a União, tem registrado variações muito modestas. A combinação de arrecadação em alta e o IGP-DI baixo contribuíram para o tombo de relações dívida/receita como a do município de São Paulo, que caiu de 246,5% em 2004 para 196,6% em 2006. Em Curitiba, a relação atingiu 2,42% no fim de 2006.Khair chama a atenção ainda para o que considera o "escândalo dos precatórios", as dívidas judiciais que os governos têm de pagar, mas o fazem a um ritmo muito lento. Graças a uma proposta de emenda constitucional - a PEC 12 -, o calote desses débitos poderá ser consagrado, acusa ele, porque ela possibilitará o parcelamento dos débitos por prazos muito longos. Para os credores, uma péssima notícia. Para Estados e municípios, porém, um alívio fiscal.
Auditoria e Gestão de Pessoas
Accounting for good people - Talent management - Talent management
The Economist - 21/07/2007
Surprising as it might seem, the Big Four accountancy firms have lots to teach other companies about managing talented people
BEING interesting can be overrated. Accountants became suddenly intriguing in 2002 with the spectacular collapse of Arthur Andersen, because of its involvement in the scandals surrounding the fall of Enron. This added unwanted colour to a grey profession. Since then the surviving titans of accountancy—Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), also known as the Big Four—have mostly retreated back into the shadows of public awareness. But interesting they remain, above all for the way they manage their people.
It is not just that they collectively employ some 500,000 people around the world. Many companies are as big as they are. Unlike most, however, the Big Four really mean it when they say that people are their biggest assets. Their product is their employees' knowledge and their distribution channels are the relationships between their staff and clients. More than most they must worry about how to attract and retain the brightest workers.
Time is regularly set aside at the highest levels to chew over how best to do this. Detailed goals are set: Deloitte's 2010 business plan includes targets for staff turnover, the scores it seeks in its annual staff survey and the proportion of female partners it would like to have. Partners are increasingly measured and rewarded as managers of people, not just for the amount of money they bring in. People-related items account for one-third of the scorecard used to evaluate partners at PwC. KPMG's British firm has introduced time codes so that employees can account for how long they spend dealing with staff matters. The idea is that those who devote lots of time to people-related matters are not disadvantaged as a result in pay rises and promotion.
The Big Four are by no means perfect. The sheer numbers they employ can still make them feel like sausage factories. Small firms are quick to take advantage of that when recruiting. Nevertheless, the big firms' evolving efforts to attract the best candidates and to encourage and keep the brightest people provide useful lessons for other companies.
The most intractable problem is that there are never enough skilled or promising people to go around. Just as competition for the best of the bunch is growing, the pool of available talent is changing. In America baby-boomers are flooding into retirement; in Europe the market is greying; and in India and China the large number of graduates masks low numbers of truly high-quality candidates.
Staff demands
There are added problems for accountancy firms. Job cuts earlier in the decade created a shortfall of people now. Regulatory changes, such as America's Sarbanes-Oxley Act, have boosted demand from clients not just for accountants' services but also for their staff. To add to their difficulties the Big Four are now aggressively re-entering the field of advisory services, necessitating a new burst of hiring. Ernst & Young is not unusual: it hired some 25,000 people in 2006, but expects to hire 30,000 this year and 35,000 in 2008.
Much of this recruitment is aimed at hard-to-find experienced professionals, especially important in the advisory businesses where corporate knowledge is highly valued. As a result, an old taboo is being broken and more outsiders brought straight in as partners. Robust selection procedures are used to ensure that they fit in. Programmes that help keep the firm in touch with former employees are also being strengthened so that people who leave can more easily find their way back (these “boomerangs” account for up to a quarter of those hired by the Big Four in America).
Former employees can also act as useful recruiting agents and help to drum up new business. For these alumni programmes to work “a massive cultural switch” is needed, says Keith Dugdale, who looks after global recruitment for KPMG. Few employers are used to helping people leave on good terms. But in an era of job-hopping and a scarcity of skills, loyalty increasingly means having a sense of emotional allegiance to an employer, whether or not that person is still physically on the payroll.
A similar change in attitude is needed to manage the careers of female employees. Each of the Big Four wants to promote more women, who account for about half of their recruits but around a quarter, at best, of their partners. Many women drop off the career ladder at some point (usually to have children or to care for an elderly relative) and find it difficult to get back on again. Options such as career breaks and part-time working are part of the accountants' response. “The Big Four are ahead of most in managing talented women,” says Sylvia Hewlett, author of “Off-Ramps and On-Ramps”, a new book on the subject (see box on next page).
Across borders
Gaps in one country can be plugged with people from another. The Big Four have big plans in Asia, especially China. Deloitte aims to have 20,000 people in greater China by 2015, up from some 8,500 now. But like other firms it is finding that experienced people are thinner on the ground than promising but untested ones. One answer is to use member firms outside China to find experienced Chinese émigrés who want to return home, although they do not always get on well with local employees. Similar techniques are used to handle temporary gluts of work. Canadian accountants cross the border in droves during the American audit season to reinforce their American colleagues' efforts.
Mobility is seen as a useful way to retain and help employees develop. International assignments can be critical in attracting new graduates. According to Pierre Hurstel, Ernst & Young's global managing partner for people, new entrants want to work abroad: that's the biggest change in recruits in the past five years, he says. Recruiters at PwC are authorised to promise the best candidates on campus language training and an overseas visit at the end of their first year. International assignments can be pledged after two to three years. High-minded young people also want to work for companies with a decent ethical reputation.
Retaining good people is the biggest challenge. Turnover rates at the Big Four have historically been high—roughly 15-20% leave each year, compared with as few as 5% in some other industries. The cost of this is “astronomical”, says Jim Wall, Deloitte's managing director of human resources. Mr Wall reckons that every percentage-point drop in annual turnover rates equates to a saving of $400m-500m.
Even so, the accountant's goals are more nuanced than simply increasing retention rates. None of the big accountancy firms wants churn rates to fall too far, if only to keep the performance bar high. Mr Wall thinks a 10-12% turnover rate would be about right; Richard Baird, PwC's people chief, reckons that 12-15% is comfortable. Rather, the Big Four want more of their most talented people to stay.
The biggest staff exodus comes after three years, once recruits have been certified as accountants. Many never intend to stay any longer, aiming instead to parlay their qualifications into a new job and a fatter pay cheque somewhere else. That presents the Big Four with a particular problem: how to identify future stars among the mass of raw recruits. The trouble is, most talent-development programmes start at a later stage in people's careers.
One strategy is simply to persuade people to stay longer, which provides more time for employers to spot and seduce the best performers. The Big Four can point to research conducted among leavers that many would like to return and that even more wish they had stayed longer. Leaving after six years rather than three, say, means that people tend to go into better jobs with higher pay—which can also help the effectiveness of the alumni network.
Driving talent-management practices deeper into the organisation is the bigger priority, says Tony Osude, of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants. Talent-spotting has traditionally been left to a middle-management layer of audit supervisors until people get closer to being a partner (partly because employees tend to be invisible to many of their superiors, working as they do in small teams at the offices of the client).
The effect has been to underutilise one of the big organisational advantages that the Big Four have: a large pool of partners who can help coach less experienced staff. That is changing. Rather than seeing junior staff as expendable drones, the Big Four's talent bosses want partners to view them as future assets. As well as tying reward schemes to the better management of people, the behaviour of partners is being changed in smaller ways. Deloitte's British firm asks partners to spend a minute with their staff immediately after client meetings to provide feedback so that they fulfil more of a training role.
Scoring skills
Changing the way partners behave takes time and will not solve every problem. Audit work is not the world's most fascinating job and junior staff have limited influence over their assignments. But they can be given a clearer idea of how their career might shape up and greater control over it. Ernst & Young spent years asking partners to identify the skills needed for a gamut of roles, each of which carries a rating from one for beginner to five for a master. Using this, staff will soon be able to view not only a profile of their skills but also what capabilities they need to acquire in order to move up into more senior positions. Many of the training and development services are delivered electronically.
By giving people more control over their career development the big accounting firms are starting to recognise that an overly aggressive “up or out” approach is a risky strategy when skills and bright people are in short supply. “Not everyone will be a senior partner,” says Doug Jukes, KPMG's lead partner for people management. “But they can still be extremely valuable to the firm.” Deloitte is in the process of boosting the status and pay of principals, a grade between director and partner for senior people.
Even so, a partnership remains the goal of the ambitious. KPMG has a programme called Compass, which identifies 11 career milestones on the path to becoming a senior partner, each of which triggers development activities. PwC runs Genesis Park, a five-month residential course for a hand-picked group of would-be partners from around the world.
People are expected to keep learning and networking after they have been made a partner too. Mr Hurstel, at Ernst & Young, worries about how to keep long-serving partners happy and energised, especially after the Enron scandals have eroded their godlike status. “Great armies have the capacity to restore their wounded,” he says. One of the programmes he runs is called “leaving a legacy”. It is designed in part to help prepare partners for life outside the firm, perhaps as board directors, but also to help them pass on their expertise.
The scale of resources pumped into talent management by the Big Four may be beyond most employers, but many of their ideas could still be copied. Building programmes that keep the company in touch with former employees, offering more flexible career paths to women and making people management an explicit part of the incentive system for senior staff are all useful tools for employers of people who think for a living. A more intriguing question is whether the organisational structure of the big accounting firms also has lessons for other companies.
More room at the top
Being a partnership confers some advantages. It is not just that a large number of senior people are available to help train and encourage junior ones—what Deloitte's Mr Wall calls an apprentice model—but that more people can succeed. Whereas success at a typical company means climbing to one of a few top positions—and probably elbowing others aside in the process—partnerships provide a broader top to the pyramid. Between them, the Big Four firms had more than 30,000 partners in 2006.
Partnerships are also flexible: if someone is good enough, the number of partners can be expanded to accommodate them. They are also consensual in style, which is important when managing clever, self-regarding people. The principles of joint ownership help to encourage networking and co-operative behaviour. “It is easier to persuade people about the importance of talent management in a partnership,” says Mr Baird.
But partnerships also have their downsides. Decision-making and innovation can be a lot tougher when so many other people have to be consulted. And in big partnerships people cease to know each other personally. For the Big Four, these problems are reinforced by their unwieldy federations of individual member firms scattered around the world.
According to Lowell Bryan, a partner at McKinsey and author of “Mobilising Minds”, a new book on getting the most from people, the ideal corporate organisation would blend elements of the typical company, the armed forces and professional services firms. An expanded “partner-like” group of senior managers at the top of the company is one of the features that he thinks could usefully be borrowed from professional services.
Cynics may wonder if the Big Four's focus on talent is only cyclical. Will expansion in their fast-growing advisory businesses make them less concerned about nurturing people in lower-margin audit work? Would an economic downturn quickly send head-counts plunging again? The size of workforces at individual firms, and in the business lines within them, will continue to ebb and flow with demand. But the supply constraints faced by employers are more rigid. As the battle in the long-heralded “war for talent” is joined across industries and countries, it could be worth keeping an eye on how the Big Four are quietly leading the charge.
The Economist - 21/07/2007
Surprising as it might seem, the Big Four accountancy firms have lots to teach other companies about managing talented people
BEING interesting can be overrated. Accountants became suddenly intriguing in 2002 with the spectacular collapse of Arthur Andersen, because of its involvement in the scandals surrounding the fall of Enron. This added unwanted colour to a grey profession. Since then the surviving titans of accountancy—Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), also known as the Big Four—have mostly retreated back into the shadows of public awareness. But interesting they remain, above all for the way they manage their people.
It is not just that they collectively employ some 500,000 people around the world. Many companies are as big as they are. Unlike most, however, the Big Four really mean it when they say that people are their biggest assets. Their product is their employees' knowledge and their distribution channels are the relationships between their staff and clients. More than most they must worry about how to attract and retain the brightest workers.
Time is regularly set aside at the highest levels to chew over how best to do this. Detailed goals are set: Deloitte's 2010 business plan includes targets for staff turnover, the scores it seeks in its annual staff survey and the proportion of female partners it would like to have. Partners are increasingly measured and rewarded as managers of people, not just for the amount of money they bring in. People-related items account for one-third of the scorecard used to evaluate partners at PwC. KPMG's British firm has introduced time codes so that employees can account for how long they spend dealing with staff matters. The idea is that those who devote lots of time to people-related matters are not disadvantaged as a result in pay rises and promotion.
The Big Four are by no means perfect. The sheer numbers they employ can still make them feel like sausage factories. Small firms are quick to take advantage of that when recruiting. Nevertheless, the big firms' evolving efforts to attract the best candidates and to encourage and keep the brightest people provide useful lessons for other companies.
The most intractable problem is that there are never enough skilled or promising people to go around. Just as competition for the best of the bunch is growing, the pool of available talent is changing. In America baby-boomers are flooding into retirement; in Europe the market is greying; and in India and China the large number of graduates masks low numbers of truly high-quality candidates.
Staff demands
There are added problems for accountancy firms. Job cuts earlier in the decade created a shortfall of people now. Regulatory changes, such as America's Sarbanes-Oxley Act, have boosted demand from clients not just for accountants' services but also for their staff. To add to their difficulties the Big Four are now aggressively re-entering the field of advisory services, necessitating a new burst of hiring. Ernst & Young is not unusual: it hired some 25,000 people in 2006, but expects to hire 30,000 this year and 35,000 in 2008.
Much of this recruitment is aimed at hard-to-find experienced professionals, especially important in the advisory businesses where corporate knowledge is highly valued. As a result, an old taboo is being broken and more outsiders brought straight in as partners. Robust selection procedures are used to ensure that they fit in. Programmes that help keep the firm in touch with former employees are also being strengthened so that people who leave can more easily find their way back (these “boomerangs” account for up to a quarter of those hired by the Big Four in America).
Former employees can also act as useful recruiting agents and help to drum up new business. For these alumni programmes to work “a massive cultural switch” is needed, says Keith Dugdale, who looks after global recruitment for KPMG. Few employers are used to helping people leave on good terms. But in an era of job-hopping and a scarcity of skills, loyalty increasingly means having a sense of emotional allegiance to an employer, whether or not that person is still physically on the payroll.
A similar change in attitude is needed to manage the careers of female employees. Each of the Big Four wants to promote more women, who account for about half of their recruits but around a quarter, at best, of their partners. Many women drop off the career ladder at some point (usually to have children or to care for an elderly relative) and find it difficult to get back on again. Options such as career breaks and part-time working are part of the accountants' response. “The Big Four are ahead of most in managing talented women,” says Sylvia Hewlett, author of “Off-Ramps and On-Ramps”, a new book on the subject (see box on next page).
Across borders
Gaps in one country can be plugged with people from another. The Big Four have big plans in Asia, especially China. Deloitte aims to have 20,000 people in greater China by 2015, up from some 8,500 now. But like other firms it is finding that experienced people are thinner on the ground than promising but untested ones. One answer is to use member firms outside China to find experienced Chinese émigrés who want to return home, although they do not always get on well with local employees. Similar techniques are used to handle temporary gluts of work. Canadian accountants cross the border in droves during the American audit season to reinforce their American colleagues' efforts.
Mobility is seen as a useful way to retain and help employees develop. International assignments can be critical in attracting new graduates. According to Pierre Hurstel, Ernst & Young's global managing partner for people, new entrants want to work abroad: that's the biggest change in recruits in the past five years, he says. Recruiters at PwC are authorised to promise the best candidates on campus language training and an overseas visit at the end of their first year. International assignments can be pledged after two to three years. High-minded young people also want to work for companies with a decent ethical reputation.
Retaining good people is the biggest challenge. Turnover rates at the Big Four have historically been high—roughly 15-20% leave each year, compared with as few as 5% in some other industries. The cost of this is “astronomical”, says Jim Wall, Deloitte's managing director of human resources. Mr Wall reckons that every percentage-point drop in annual turnover rates equates to a saving of $400m-500m.
Even so, the accountant's goals are more nuanced than simply increasing retention rates. None of the big accountancy firms wants churn rates to fall too far, if only to keep the performance bar high. Mr Wall thinks a 10-12% turnover rate would be about right; Richard Baird, PwC's people chief, reckons that 12-15% is comfortable. Rather, the Big Four want more of their most talented people to stay.
The biggest staff exodus comes after three years, once recruits have been certified as accountants. Many never intend to stay any longer, aiming instead to parlay their qualifications into a new job and a fatter pay cheque somewhere else. That presents the Big Four with a particular problem: how to identify future stars among the mass of raw recruits. The trouble is, most talent-development programmes start at a later stage in people's careers.
One strategy is simply to persuade people to stay longer, which provides more time for employers to spot and seduce the best performers. The Big Four can point to research conducted among leavers that many would like to return and that even more wish they had stayed longer. Leaving after six years rather than three, say, means that people tend to go into better jobs with higher pay—which can also help the effectiveness of the alumni network.
Driving talent-management practices deeper into the organisation is the bigger priority, says Tony Osude, of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants. Talent-spotting has traditionally been left to a middle-management layer of audit supervisors until people get closer to being a partner (partly because employees tend to be invisible to many of their superiors, working as they do in small teams at the offices of the client).
The effect has been to underutilise one of the big organisational advantages that the Big Four have: a large pool of partners who can help coach less experienced staff. That is changing. Rather than seeing junior staff as expendable drones, the Big Four's talent bosses want partners to view them as future assets. As well as tying reward schemes to the better management of people, the behaviour of partners is being changed in smaller ways. Deloitte's British firm asks partners to spend a minute with their staff immediately after client meetings to provide feedback so that they fulfil more of a training role.
Scoring skills
Changing the way partners behave takes time and will not solve every problem. Audit work is not the world's most fascinating job and junior staff have limited influence over their assignments. But they can be given a clearer idea of how their career might shape up and greater control over it. Ernst & Young spent years asking partners to identify the skills needed for a gamut of roles, each of which carries a rating from one for beginner to five for a master. Using this, staff will soon be able to view not only a profile of their skills but also what capabilities they need to acquire in order to move up into more senior positions. Many of the training and development services are delivered electronically.
By giving people more control over their career development the big accounting firms are starting to recognise that an overly aggressive “up or out” approach is a risky strategy when skills and bright people are in short supply. “Not everyone will be a senior partner,” says Doug Jukes, KPMG's lead partner for people management. “But they can still be extremely valuable to the firm.” Deloitte is in the process of boosting the status and pay of principals, a grade between director and partner for senior people.
Even so, a partnership remains the goal of the ambitious. KPMG has a programme called Compass, which identifies 11 career milestones on the path to becoming a senior partner, each of which triggers development activities. PwC runs Genesis Park, a five-month residential course for a hand-picked group of would-be partners from around the world.
People are expected to keep learning and networking after they have been made a partner too. Mr Hurstel, at Ernst & Young, worries about how to keep long-serving partners happy and energised, especially after the Enron scandals have eroded their godlike status. “Great armies have the capacity to restore their wounded,” he says. One of the programmes he runs is called “leaving a legacy”. It is designed in part to help prepare partners for life outside the firm, perhaps as board directors, but also to help them pass on their expertise.
The scale of resources pumped into talent management by the Big Four may be beyond most employers, but many of their ideas could still be copied. Building programmes that keep the company in touch with former employees, offering more flexible career paths to women and making people management an explicit part of the incentive system for senior staff are all useful tools for employers of people who think for a living. A more intriguing question is whether the organisational structure of the big accounting firms also has lessons for other companies.
More room at the top
Being a partnership confers some advantages. It is not just that a large number of senior people are available to help train and encourage junior ones—what Deloitte's Mr Wall calls an apprentice model—but that more people can succeed. Whereas success at a typical company means climbing to one of a few top positions—and probably elbowing others aside in the process—partnerships provide a broader top to the pyramid. Between them, the Big Four firms had more than 30,000 partners in 2006.
Partnerships are also flexible: if someone is good enough, the number of partners can be expanded to accommodate them. They are also consensual in style, which is important when managing clever, self-regarding people. The principles of joint ownership help to encourage networking and co-operative behaviour. “It is easier to persuade people about the importance of talent management in a partnership,” says Mr Baird.
But partnerships also have their downsides. Decision-making and innovation can be a lot tougher when so many other people have to be consulted. And in big partnerships people cease to know each other personally. For the Big Four, these problems are reinforced by their unwieldy federations of individual member firms scattered around the world.
According to Lowell Bryan, a partner at McKinsey and author of “Mobilising Minds”, a new book on getting the most from people, the ideal corporate organisation would blend elements of the typical company, the armed forces and professional services firms. An expanded “partner-like” group of senior managers at the top of the company is one of the features that he thinks could usefully be borrowed from professional services.
Cynics may wonder if the Big Four's focus on talent is only cyclical. Will expansion in their fast-growing advisory businesses make them less concerned about nurturing people in lower-margin audit work? Would an economic downturn quickly send head-counts plunging again? The size of workforces at individual firms, and in the business lines within them, will continue to ebb and flow with demand. But the supply constraints faced by employers are more rigid. As the battle in the long-heralded “war for talent” is joined across industries and countries, it could be worth keeping an eye on how the Big Four are quietly leading the charge.
Caixa e Crescimento
Geralmente a análise econômico-financeira indica que o crescimento da empresa representa uma redução no fluxo de caixa operacional. Uma reportagem, da CFO (Growing with the Flow, julho de 2007), mostra que pode existir exceção.
Um dos estudiosos do fluxo de caixa, Mulford, desenvolveu uma medida de free cash flow, onde se tenta mensurar o montante de fluxo de caixa incremental que será proveniente do crescimento da receita.
Um dos estudiosos do fluxo de caixa, Mulford, desenvolveu uma medida de free cash flow, onde se tenta mensurar o montante de fluxo de caixa incremental que será proveniente do crescimento da receita.
Índia adere as normas internacionais
É o que informa o Financial Express (Financial Express: Indian accounting to go global, 21/07/2007) e o Business Standard ( Indian accounting standards to match global norms by 2011 ; Indian accounting standards will be fully in line with the..., 22/07/2007). O prazo é 1o. de abril de 2011. Esta decisão foi toma pela Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) e no início somente as empresas abertas estarão obrigadas. Conforme a reportagem do Financial Express:
Avinash Chander, technical director at, told FE that many of the present accounting standards would be revised as a result of the decision while ICAI will also introduce new ones to be in tune with international standards. For example, the present Accounting Standard 10 (AS10) will be revised and its title will be changed from Accounting for Fixed Assets' to Property, Plant and Equipment', as is there in international standard of IASB. "As part of this revision, companies will have to either go for historical costs for valuing their fixed assets or else choose for a periodic revaluation system, also specifying the periodicity of revaluation that would need to be followed on a mandatory basis," Chander said. He said while companies can still revalue fixed assets like land and buildings, it is presently at their discretion and there is no fixed periodicity attached to the process. Other areas where changes can be expected are on financial instruments, where the ICAI is now planning to incorporate standards on accounting for derivatives like futures, options and swaps.
Mulher e auditoria
A revista The Economist relata a discriminação contra a mulher na área de auditoria (Breaks and ladders - Women and work, 21/07/2007). A questão está refletida na própria tendência esperada pelas empresas. Na KPMG a expectativa é que um quarto dos partners em 2010 sejam de mulheres. Na Deloitte o objetivo é 31% de partners e diretores do sexo feminino em 2009, um aumento de 26% em relação a atual situação. Mesmo assim, estes objetivos são considerados como modestos por Sylvia Hewlett, do Centre for Work-Life Policy de Nova Iorque.
Um dos problemas apontados pela reportagem é dificuldade de conciliar trabalho e vida através de um trabalho mais flexível. E não é só criança, mas também o cuidado com parentes mais idosos.
Um dos problemas apontados pela reportagem é dificuldade de conciliar trabalho e vida através de um trabalho mais flexível. E não é só criança, mas também o cuidado com parentes mais idosos.
Propaganda de remédios
Existe um movimento de restrição de certos tipos de propaganda. No Brasil há uma movimentação para restringir a propaganda de cerveja na televisão, assim como já foi proibido a propaganda de cigarro. No Estados Unidos, existe uma tentativa de proibição de propaganda de novos medicamentos (aqui)
O gráfico mostra que o volume de dinheiro gasto em propaganda pelos remédios é significativo e está crescendo nos últimos anos. A diferença entre proibir a propaganda de cerveja e de novos remédios é que a cerveja é algo que provoca problemas na saúde do consumidor.
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