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Our audit approach will allow our client's accounting personnel to make the maximum contribution to the audit effort without compromising their ongoing responsibilities
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At P&A Grant Thornton, we provide annual and short period financial statement audit services that go beyond the normal expectations of our clients. We believe strongly that our best work comes from combining outstanding technical expertise, knowledge and ability with exceptional client-focused service.
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Review engagement
A review involves limited investigation with a narrower scope than an audit, and is undertaken for the purpose of providing limited assurance that the management’s representations are in accordance with identified financial reporting standards. Our professionals recognize that in order to conduct a quality financial statement review, it is important to look beyond the accounting entries to the underlying activities and operations that give rise to them.
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Other Related Services
We make it a point to keep our clients abreast of the developments and updates relating to the growing complexities in the accounting world. We offer seminars and trainings on audit- and tax-related matters, such as updates on Accounting Standards, new pronouncements and Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) issuances, as well as other developments that affect our clients’ businesses.
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With our knowledge of tax laws and audit procedures, we help safeguard the substantive and procedural rights of taxpayers and prevent unwarranted assessments.
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Tax compliance
We aim to minimize the impact of taxation, enabling you to maximize your potential savings and to expand your business.
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Corporate services
For clients that want to do business in the Philippines, we assist in determining the appropriate and tax-efficient operating business or investment vehicle and structure to address the objectives of the investor, as well as related incorporation issues.
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Tax education and advocacy
Our advocacy work focuses on clarifying the interpretation of laws and regulations, suggesting measures to increasingly ease tax compliance, and protecting taxpayer’s rights.
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Business risk services
Our business risk services cover a wide range of solutions that assist you in identifying, addressing and monitoring risks in your business. Such solutions include external quality assessments of your Internal Audit activities' conformance with standards as well as evaluating its readiness for such an external assessment.
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Business consulting services
Our business consulting services are aimed at addressing concerns in your operations, processes and systems. Using our extensive knowledge of various industries, we can take a close look at your business processes as we create solutions that can help you mitigate risks to meet your objectives, promote efficiency, and beef up controls.
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Transaction services
Transaction advisory includes all of our services specifically directed at assisting in investment, mergers and acquisitions, and financing transactions between and among businesses, lenders and governments. Such services include, among others, due diligence reviews, project feasibility studies, financial modelling, model audits and valuation.
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Forensic advisory
Our forensic advisory services include assessing your vulnerability to fraud and identifying fraud risk factors, and recommending practical solutions to eliminate the gaps. We also provide investigative services to detect and quantify fraud and corruption and to trace assets and data that may have been lost in a fraud event.
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Cyber advisory
Our focus is to help you identify and manage the cyber risks you might be facing within your organization. Our team can provide detailed, actionable insight that incorporates industry best practices and standards to strengthen your cybersecurity position and help you make informed decisions.
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ProActive Hotline
Providing support in preventing and detecting fraud by creating a safe and secure whistleblowing system to promote integrity and honesty in the organisation.
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Accounting services
At P&A Grant Thornton, we handle accounting services for several companies from a wide range of industries. Our approach is highly flexible. You may opt to outsource all your accounting functions, or pass on to us choice activities.
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Staff augmentation services
We offer Staff Augmentation services where our staff, under the direction and supervision of the company’s officers, perform accounting and accounting-related work.
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Payroll Processing
Payroll processing services are provided by P&A Grant Thornton Outsourcing Inc. More and more companies are beginning to realize the benefits of outsourcing their noncore activities, and the first to be outsourced is usually the payroll function. Payroll is easy to carve out from the rest of the business since it is usually independent of the other activities or functions within the Accounting Department.
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P&A Grant Thornton offers something you can't find anywhere else. This is the opportunity to develop your ideas and thinking while having your efforts recognised from day one. We value the skills and knowledge you bring to Grant Thornton as an experienced professional and look forward to supporting you as you grow you career with our organisation.
What's in a list?
09 Nov 2016Likemost persons, my interest is piqued by any sort of lists or rankings, from NBA’s all-time greatest to Billboard’s Top 100. Thus, when I recently came across the latest Harvard Business Review’s (HBR) list of best-performing CEOs,I really had to take a look.
What grabbed my attention was that the highest-ranked CEO that I have heard of in the list is Howard Schultz. The Starbucks CEO appeared at No. 14 and none in the Top 10 even sounded remotely familiar to me (No Mark Zuckerberg, ladies and gents!). Comparing the list with that of glassdoor.com, a job-and-recruiting site, which has its own list of the highest rated CEOs (ranked by employees), there are only less than ten names that appeared on both.
So what sort of criteria did HBR use to come up with this ranking and what can we, “mere mortals”, learn from this?
Starting in 2015, HBR made a significant change in how it determines the rankings. From basing purely on financial returns, HBR included as a criterion the environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance, which accounts for 20 percent of the total score. This additional criterion considers certain non-financial aspects that are generating a buzz in recent years.
The ESG score gives weight to how a company manages environmental (e.g., energy use, environmental risk), social (e.g., relationships with suppliers, employees, and community) and governance (e.g., accounting methods, conflict of interest, illegal behavior) issues. The inclusion of the ESG score helps in increasing awareness that businesses are no longer simply about making money but also about sustainability, both for the companies and the ecosystems they are conducting their businesses in.
Similarly, this mindset of doing well and, at the same time, doing good, can also be embraced by individuals. We should consider having our own personal “ESG” metrics. Life is more than just money. There are other important issues like the environment, relationships, personal integrity, and ethical behavior that matter.
Interestingly, the top three CEOs took different paths in their journey to become CEOs. Lars Rebien Sørensen (No. 1) started his career at a global healthcare company, Novo Nordisk, in 1982 and was assigned to different operational roles before being appointed as its CEO in 2000. Martin Sorrell (No. 2), who has an MBA degree from Harvard, was essentially the founder of WPP (the world’s largest communications services group with 190,000 employees in 113 countries), after working in different fields like marketing, sports agency and food retail. Pablo Isla (No. 3) has a degree in law and worked in the Spanish government before being appointed as CEO of Inditex (regarded as a leading fashion retail groups in the world).
From these examples, we can gather that people can take different career paths but should acquire expertise and competencies along the way. One could either stay in just one company or move around working with different companies, get a post graduate degree, etc; but the important thing is the acquisition and development of competencies that would prepare one to be a good leader.
Another interesting dimension of this ranking is that HBR scored the CEOs, not on the basis of their most recent performances, but on their total career performance as CEO. Hence, this list is not about who are the talks of the town or who are acquiring the latest billions for their organizations; but rather about who have been doing exceptionally well for a longer while. This brings to focus the issue of meeting short-term goals versus keeping a long-term view in mind. Ideally, more weight should be placed on strategies and actions taken for a meaningful and sustained long-term result. However, in reality, the market usually measures performance on short-term results—quarterly even, for listed companies.
Applied in parallel context, do not sacrifice long-term goals when aiming for short-term results. Until such time a performance evaluation system that can help to measure the long-term impact of actions is developed, we should keep in mind the need to also consider the long-term values of our (or the people we are evaluating) short-term actions and decisions.
This HBR ranking of best-performing CEOs, to me, is more than just a list of who’s who in the business world based on certain criteria. There are valuable insights that we can apply as we go through our own personal climb in our chosen careers: that financial performance is not the be-all and end-all; that we should have our own ESG metrics; that we should make it a point to work on our competencies; and that our view should be more on long-term results than short-term gains.
Anton Ng is a Partner, Audit & Assurance of P&A Grant Thornton. P&A Grant Thornton is one of the leading Audit, Tax, Advisory, and Outsourcing firms in the Philippines, with 21 Partners and over 800 staff members.
As published in The Manila Times, dated 9 November 2016