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I don't believe it!

Still smarting a little from the stinging criticism aimed at us by a small minority of members who feel that the ICB is continually and needlessly reminding them of the need for professional standards, I am completely exasperated that over the past couple of weeks we have received a raft of unnecessary complaints about members who have done things they shouldn't have done.

Why unnecessary?  Because if they had heeded my 'continuous, needless reminders' they wouldn't have got into the fix in which they now find themselves.

The problem is that bookkeepers don't like to say no. 

This week we have received a complaint against a member who has fouled up someone's payroll.  Not surprising really, she is not qualified to do payroll. She's never had any training.  But how difficult can it be?  Obviously more difficult than she thought.  What's more she was 'too busy' to renew her Practice Licence.  So not only is she carrying out work for which she is unqualified, she is trading illegally by not having a current licence and is therefore not complying with the Professional Conduct Regulations of the ICB or, even more important, the legal requirement to be registered under the money laundering regulations either.  Not surprisingly her professional indemnity insurers have now washed their hands of her as her lack of licence has invalidated her cover.

We then had the complaint against a member, this time from HMRC, for lack of a Practice Licence and therefore MLR registration.  One of the member's clients was selected for random inspection.  As soon as they walked through the door they asked the member, who was there to support the client, with which organisation she was registered for MLR.  ICB she said.  But when, on arrival back at their offices, HMRC checked with the ICB, we had to inform them that the member did not have, or never did have, a Practice Licence.  Her claims that she "can't remember being told about the need for a Licence" flies in the face of the evidence from the band of disgruntled members referred to earlier in this rant.

And to cap it all, one member has very stupidly not only completed a set of annual accounts for their client but has actually signed as the Auditor and filed them at Companies House!!!!! (more information...)

Now I know that we have never, technically, said that bookkeepers can't audit final accounts but we thought that everyone would know that only Registered Auditors are permitted by Law to do this.  It's one of the few protected sections of the profession.  So just in case there are more of you are out there, stranded in some delusional state, unaware of the grave error it would be to do something like this - bookkeepers cannot audit year-end accounts.

This is not to say that you cannot inspect a set of accounts for a local charity or a school, for example; we're talking about the accounts filed at Companies House for large companies.

As I have said on many occasions, 99% of bookkeepers, like clients, are legal, decent, honest and truthful and do what they should when they should do it.  However, there remains that odd percentage of the members that seem, either by choice or lack of common sense, to live in some sort of parallel universe bouncing around from crisis to crisis like some manic dodgem driver who is determined to cause as much mayhem as possible to all those who surround them.

As Big Phil used to say at the start of the day in iconic Hill Street Blues, "please be careful out there".  And if you are unsure about what you can and can't do, please ask the ICB, not some on-line forum that a surprising number of the odd people discussed above seem to inhabit and pass on their pearls of knowledge without thought for others or reliance on anything so mundane as fact.