Reynolds Porter Chamberlain LLP, the city law firm, has reported that 1,437 disqualification orders were placed on directors of companies, including the clients of contractor accountants, that had gone into insolvency last year, a 4 % increase on the number imposed in 2009.

Five years ago there were only 1,173 disqualification orders but since then 6,422 directors have found themselves disqualified. A disqualification order forbids a director of an insolvent company becoming a director or creating or promoting a limited company for anything up to 15 years.

Company insolvencies reached a peak in the third quarter of 2009 when the UK was in the middle of the economic downturn.

Jonathan Davies, a partner at RPC, commented on the results saying that a disqualification order can be career threatening for a director as the director is unable to set up or participate in the creation of a new business for such a long time.

Administrators and liquidators look to blame somebody when a company goes insolvent and company directors have felt the brunt. There was a substantial increase in insolvencies during the economic crisis and as a direct result we have witnessed this increase in disqualification orders.

The law firm also pointed out that the government has clamped down on corporate governance issues since the start of the recession and company directors should protect themselves by obtaining Directors & Officers insurance. A lot of small firms and limited company contractors forego this cover and end up paying enormous legal costs if their company is investigated.

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Another frustrating week in the hunt for the next contract. It’s clear that there is still a fair bit of work out there for the taking. Sadly it’s also clear that there are an awful lot of people out there trying to take it and competition is very strong. But it seems to have had at least one side-effect; you must only apply for a job if that’s the job you’re already doing.

You can accept that if the role is in say Finance, then clearly you do save a lot of issues taking on someone who already works in Finance, since they would know the regulatory and business environment. Actually it turns out an awful lot of openings are in Finance since the only people with the money to spend are the banks. Wonder where they got it all…

Anyway, I digress. Taking someone already in an industry vertical, while frustrating to the outsiders looking in, is quite understandable. However, the market now sees to be taking this to a whole new level which is what causes the frustration: no matter how good you are at what you do, if someone doesn’t want you to do exactly the same thing for them that you’re doing now, then you have a problem.

I’ve talked before about the whole agency candidate-finding process being reduced to a box-ticking exercise in an attempt to get the flood of applications down to manageable levels. This also saves them a lot of money themselves of course, since the bulk of the work can be delegated to fairly junior researchers who don’t actually need to understand the role or the candidates.

So getting a role is now totally dependent on what it says on the CV. And that is where it all starts to go a bit wrong.

If your CV is to stand a chance it has to be a very close match to the original requirement. Sadly, however, with the laziness of the average agent, a lot of the job specification doesn’t make it to the advert; probably takes too long to cut-and-paste it in to Broadbean or whatever they use to set the adverts up. Given a career history like mine that is pretty wide ranging, I then have to work out which bits to highlight in the first page summary on my CV – no agent bothers to read the detailed job history any more – to stand even a vague chance of getting past the first filtering process at the agency, never mind getting passed on to the client. And if the advert misses a key bit of information, then you fail at the first hurdle.

As an example, I put an application in yesterday evening and around midday today I finally got to talk to the agent about the role. Too late! It seems the role was largely about recovering a programme of work that was not delivering and needed a total shake up. “But you didn’t ask for that, and as it happens that’s what three of my last four roles were mostly all about, fixing and successfully delivering broken projects” I pointed out. One of which, incidentally, was worth around £250 million.

“Ah but”, was the reply, “You didn’t state that explicitly so I didn’t pick it up. Sorry, but I’ve already sent in all the CVs I’m allowed to”. End of conversation.

So there in a nutshell is why good people are sat on the bench. This whole market needs a different approach. And that’s something I will talk about next week.

Meanwhile, anyone need an expert is anything?

Alan Watts can found at LinkedIn.
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Nearly 50% of all UK contractor accountants are on the hunt for a new job and 61% of them would consider a role that paid less than their current or most recent position.

These are the results of a study Martin Ward Anderson that show that money is not necessarily the determining factor when deciding whether to look for a new job.

Of the respondents that were questioned, most were earning between £50,000 – £75,000 per annum. Yet over 90% said that they would consider a lower paid job if the commuting time, work-life balance and general working conditions were right.

Paul Robinson, a director of Martin Ward Anderson suggested that many accountants are over-worked and have been treated badly by their employers, particularly since the start of the economic downturn. This may have resulted in a lack of loyalty to their current boss, hence the possibility of moving on.

Disgruntlement within the accountancy profession was also highlighted in research by accountancy software provider E-conomic last month that showed that nearly half of all accountants would prefer to be doing something else in the next five years.

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According to a recent study by accountancy software company E-conomic, nearly 50% of contractor accountants are planning on changing careers at some point in the next five years.

Why? Because they believe that the regulations surrounding tax and financial reporting will become tougher, which in turn will lead to an increasingly stressful workload.

The accountancy profession is already at breaking point following a surge of onerous and complex regulations brought in by the current government to control inflation and to give greater powers to HMRC.

Of the people that took part in the survey, most said that they were looking forward to retirement from the profession in the next five years.

Slightly less than 90% of respondents said that it was becoming increasingly more difficult to keep abreast of financial reporting and taxation requirements, while 57% believe that HMRC will soon enjoy much more of a direct involvement in areas such as compliance.

More than 25% of accountants said that they are keen to explore the possibility of outsourcing, with 75 per cent suggesting that their roles will change beyond recognition over the coming years.

According to the study, accountants feel that they will be used in an advisory capacity in the future with over 80% believing that this will be an integral part of the services they provide to clients.

Over 33% think  that a paperless office will become the norm over the next five years and slightly less than 50% see themselves accessing clients’ records via cloud based systems and working remotely.

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