.. women get it tougher.
I am deeply saddened by today's news that Sacha Romanovitch is being booted out of GT. She has been a wonderful role model for young women in accountancy and has done important things at GT. It seems that her public profile suited GT partners when things were going well but the Patisserie Valerie scandal has apparently tipped the balance. I'd like to know who the PV audit partner is and what action will be taken against him or her.
Have you ever heard of Bill Michael, David Sproul, Kevin Ellis or Steve Varley? They are the leaders of the Big Four accountancy firms. They manage to keep a pretty low profile, don't they, in spite of the audit problems which swirl around their firms on a regular basis. And if their fellow partners have briefed against them anonymously, the press haven't thought it worth reporting.
I have always admired GT. My very first experience of the accountancy profession, many years ago, was a summer job with a firm in Sheffield which was taken over by Thornton Baker. The staff were all so eccentric that I don't think taking on a girl seemed at all odd to them, which meant that I had no idea that I would encounter any gender prejudice in the future...
When I first started teaching, it was difficult for poly graduates, even with first class degrees, to get training contracts, because those in charge of recruitment used A level results as a filter: poly students typically had poorer A level results, often for reasons beyond their control and unrelated to their intellectual ability. The partners at the local GT office were keen to employ our graduates and went out of their way to meet them and advise them on their applications.
And the GT annual corporate governance reports have been a great boon to both academics and practitioners. As academic adviser to the Turnbull review group which looked at reporting of internal control, I was asked to investigate the research process GT used to produce their report: I was very impressed by its rigour (they hadn't heard of inter-coder reliability but they knew how to deal with it...)
Sacha's leadership of the firm only increased my admiration for them. It's disappointing to find that GT is really no different from its competitors.
