For a profession that claims to value teamwork, it seems to be the new theme that everyone is involved the very individual sport of marathon-running. Not my idea of a relaxing way to spend my free time, but I think some of those accountants just don’t know how to turn off the intensity. Running a marathon is certainly an admirable accomplishment, so I don’t mean any criticism here, just humor .

Golf is the standard, of course. And I need to learn how to play. Soon.

Shutting yourself in a gym lifting weights for a few hours a day seems to be a popular choice for the male accountants who don’t want to run marathons.

Has anyone noticed any hobbies that many accountants seem to have in common? Wine tasting? Stock car racing?

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It’s hard to go and ask people in your client’s accounting department for paperwork without really understanding how an accounting system functions. Now, even if a client has a different accounting system than the company I’m working for now, I’ll have the confidence to know that my ignorance is of that specific system, not of bookkeeping in general.

Of course, having a degree in accounting means that bookkeeping is pretty understandable, and I already understand the concepts, but participating in the process at a real company just makes me feel that much more competent and reassures me that I really did learn something over the last five years!

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It was a pretty cool class. We spent about 3 weeks in class, with 2 weeks devoted to speakers from all areas of the profession from lawyers to one-man forensic accounting firms to ex-FBI agents.

Outside of class, we spent our time working in teams to solve a “fraud.” I believe the backbone of the case is used at several universities in similar classes, but basically we are given some financial data from a small company, and must try to figure out if someone is committing fraud. We could write “emails” to the characters in the fraud, which our professor and her TA would reply to in character. We could also “hire” private investigators to “follow” the characters and let us know what they saw.

It was way easier than a real fraud, of course, but then, we only had a week and a half to get it figured out, haha.

We were also encouraged to note any internal control weaknesses and errors when writing our report. I had the pleasure of working with a girl who worked in industry for 6 years before doing her masters, who was amazing at finding every tiny error. I’m not sure if it was the industry experience that helped, or simply that she pays keen attention to detail.

I would like to take the CFE (certified fraud examiner) exam eventually, but the company I’ll be working for in the fall doesn’t have a forensic accounting team, making it unlikely I’d be able to collect the necessary experience.

So, it’s something to think about for the future, and I know that sometimes partners at smaller firms will do some forensic work for their clients, even though they don’t have a regular forensic team, so it can’t hurt to take the exam just in case. (And apparently it’s waaaay easier than the CPA exam!)

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That’s a big relief, and it’s been great to be able to just focus on classwork and not have to study for the next section.

Yay!

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Here are my practice question results for BEC:

I felt pretty comfortable with most of the practice questions by the time I went to take the exam. I think the most frustrating part is that even if you have all of the practice questions DOWN, they come up with new things to fling at you on the test itself. Plus, there are only 90 questions on the test – there are so many questions I could have answered easily but they weren’t asked!

Does anyone have any insights on BEC? Did it seem more difficult than you expected? It did for me…

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“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” dealt with a lot of financial chicanery, and I was impressed by how Larsson could come up with convincing complex financial frauds. He worked in the news industry for many years, but not in the financial area like his main character (Blomkvist) does. I guess he picked up his instincts for financial scandal through strong interest in politics?

The book is fiction, but there are plenty of financial fraudsters operating out there who are just as devious as the villain in this novel. Sometimes I think the only way we find out about frauds is when someone on the inside informs, or when the fraud reaches the end of its natural life and collapses.

Does being a CPA qualify you to detect these schemes? Sometimes I wonder how many really smart people are committing fraud out there that never get caught. I hope that after some work experience, I’ll be able to answer yes to that question, but I suppose there’s a reason why we have specialized forensic accountants.

To write a book about a financial criminal, you need to be able to think like a criminal. As an auditor on the alert for fraud, you need to be aware of how fraud can be perpetrated. I’m not sure that the traditional accounting education really prepares anyone for that, so I suppose you’re supposed to pick it up mostly from experience?

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So, I’m a little surprised at how close together my AUD and REG scores are, because I felt least confident about REG and most confident about AUD. I suppose it has something to do with being graded against how everyone else performs. Maybe REG is just harder for most people than AUD is?

So, I wrote a post awhile ago of my AUD Practice Results, which I tracked so I could compare my practice test scores to my actual AUD score.

I got an average score of about 69% my first round through all of the Wiley question, and an average of 73% the second time through. That translated to an 87 on the actual exam.

I wish I had tracked my practice results for the other exams too, because it’s interesting to compare. I’m pretty sure for REG, my average scores on the homework questions were far worse that on AUD.

I am keeping track of my BEC practice questions, but I’m so busy at the moment that I’m not sure I’ll have time to run through them twice. BEC is in about a week!

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It didn’t take too long to get my other scores in the mail once everyone’s score was posted online though, so maybe I’ll know how I did on AUD in a week or two. Makes me wonder how messed up their information on me is though…

In other news, BEC is taking more time than I thought, and I’ve got so much else to do right now. Once again, the best advice I’ve gotten about the CPA exam: don’t wait to take it while you’re working! No matter how busy I am now with classes and part-time work, I don’t know where I’d find the energy to study if I had a full-time job! Kudos to those of you who pulled that off, I am very impressed with all of you

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I’m starting on the third of four Roger CPA review modules for BEC this week. I have less time than ever to fit in studying, and BEC, while short, seems to have TONS of multiple choice practice questions to get through. Hopefully they won’t take up too much time because I don’t have any more weeks off to catch up in!

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Flipping through and seeing what the other chapters cover, it looks like quite a mish-mash of topics. I’ve studied a lot of this material in college, but it looks like it covers several classes worth of topics.

1. Business structures. We touched on these in several of my undergraduate business classes. In my graduate Tax class, we also learned about this in more detail, since we had to learn how different structures are taxed differently.

2. Economic concepts. Now we’re back to macro- and micro-economics. I took those classes several years ago, but hopefully I’ll remember the basics. We’ve also touched on some of these concepts in finance classes.

3. Financial management. Looks like this will be similar to basic finance class subjects.

4. Information technology. I’ve heard from several students who took BEC that they were surprised by how much of the exam seemed to test knowledge that we learned in our Accounting Information Systems class. It looks like this section is around 25% of the exam, so I can see why it’s a big deal. I foresee this being the hardest section for me to deal with.

5. Planning and measurement. Looks like this will take us back to good old cost accounting. Luckily, I actually quite like cost accounting, but I know that many of my fellow students hated that class. In either case, the impression I get is that people find this material boring, but not particularly challenging.
A couple people get annoying by this class because cost accounting doesn’t have as many clear-cut rules as financial accounting does. Of course, remember the 7 deadly myths of accounting-myth number 1: “learning accounting is like learning the rules of a game.”

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