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Audit approach overview
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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Annual and short period audit
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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Tax advisory
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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Our values
Grant Thornton prides itself on being a values-driven organisation and we have more than 38,500 people in over 130 countries who are passionately committed to these values.
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Global culture
Our people tell us that our global culture is one of the biggest attractions of a career with Grant Thornton.
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Learning & development
At Grant Thornton we believe learning and development opportunities allow you to perform at your best every day. And when you are at your best, we are the best at serving our clients
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Global talent mobility
One of the biggest attractions of a career with Grant Thornton is the opportunity to work on cross-border projects all over the world.
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Diversity
Diversity helps us meet the demands of a changing world. We value the fact that our people come from all walks of life and that this diversity of experience and perspective makes our organisation stronger as a result.
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In the community
Many Grant Thornton member firms provide a range of inspirational and generous services to the communities they serve.
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Fresh Graduates
Fresh Graduates
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Students
Whether you are starting your career as a graduate or school leaver, P&A Grant Thornton can give you a flying start. We are ambitious. Take the fact that we’re the world’s fastest-growing global accountancy organisation. For our people, that means access to a global organisation and the chance to collaborate with more than 40,000 colleagues around the world. And potentially work in different countries and experience other cultures.
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Experienced hires
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.
P&A founder Benjamin Punongbayan with the millennials in the auditing firm.
When it opened on February 15, 1988, Punongbayan & Araullo was a small startup that dared to challenge the country’s single dominant player in the auditing field. It only had eight people at the time, yet its office was built to accommodate more than a hundred.
Benjamin R. Punongbayan already loomed large in the public accounting profession then, but was the David going against the Goliath in the industry when he co-founded the firm with veteran banker Jose G. Araullo.
“The way we looked at it, we were going to be successful; so why lease a small space?” Punongbayan said.
From a “small firm with big dreams,” P&A Grant Thornton is now in the big league, particularly after becoming a member firm of Grant Thornton International, one of the world’s most prestigious accounting firms and one of the largest global accounting networks, in 2003. From a firm of eight, P&A Grant Thornton has grown to more than 900-strong with 21 partners across its nationwide network. It has kept its solid footing as one of the top five auditing firms in the country, providing audit, tax, outsourcing, and high-level advisory services.
Like many professional services firms here and abroad, P&A Grant Thornton has also been waging a war for talent. The growing slew of financial reporting standards, coupled with swelling volumes of data in business practices, is making the competition for accounting professionals tougher than ever. Not only do accountants need to be good number crunchers, they must also possess the sharp business acumen, data analytics and leadership skills, as well as the “soft skills” like critical thinking and problem solving, to provide strategic advice.
P&A Grant Thornton has so far been successful in staving off intense competition not just within the auditing industry, but also from others such as the high-paying business processing outsourcing sector.
Here are five ways the firm is recruiting, retaining, and integrating millennial talent into its workplace:
1. Find diamonds in the rough – then polish them.
Since high school, Eunice Seralbo had always wanted to be an accountant to help her family of six siblings, not one of whom had a college education. Luckily, she met Punongbayan, who found out about her financial need and gave her a full scholarship. Eunice obtained an accountancy degree from the Polytechnic University of the Philippines-Cavite campus and joined P&A Grant Thornton after passing the board.
“I have run out of words to express my gratitude. I can’t imagine where I would be right now if it weren’t for the opportunity,” said Eunice. Now a junior auditor at the firm, she financially supports her siblings and her father who is undergoing kidney dialysis three times a week.
Eunice’s Cinderella story is commonplace in the Firm, said Rhia Girmendonk Dee, People & Culture director at P&A Grant Thornton. Many of the young talents – whom they recruit from the academe, organizations such as the Junior Philippine Institute of Accountants, and online channels such as LinkedIn – come from lower socioeconomic levels and pin their hopes on the profession for a better life. “They feel they are giving justice to the world by joining the accounting profession,” Dee said.
2. Build a culture of learning.
P&A Grant Thornton has built a culture of training and development with highly visual targets on employees’ individual performance development, a “buddy system” in coaching, and a more deliberate succession plan.
The firm grooms its future leaders through an exchange program, where it sends leaders with management potential to attend graduate degree programs at the Asian Institute of Management and partners to senior executive development programs. P&A Grant Thornton also sends audit and tax professionals for a one-and-a-half- to two-year assignment at Grant Thornton International’s various offices abroad.
“New hires in an auditing firm would be on equal footing prior to training. During the training, the top performers would naturally increase their chances of getting the opportunity to handle the big-ticket accounts for obvious reasons,” said Ramil Nañola, a partner at the Audit & Assurance division and one of the pioneering audit junior staff members of the P&A Davao office nearly 30 years ago.
3. Automate systems and processes, but retool people.
Esmeralda Angeles, finance director at the Practice Support Services Division of P&A Grant Thornton, has been part of the Firm since 1994. There were only seven employees in the accounting department at the time, so they would pull all-nighters to manually get financial and budget reports out. Technology changed the way they did things, when P&A Grant Thornton made major investments in automating tedious and manual processes involving paperwork, inventory keeping, and audit reporting. General accounting professionals like Angeles had to retool, rescale, and attend training for new software and computer systems.
Accountants are considered most at risk from automation in the next 20 years as computer learning systems are seen to be more equipped to perform simple and repetitive tasks more quickly and more accurately. Seasoned HR professionals such as Dee, however, remain optimistic. “Artificial intelligence can never replicate a person’s sense of grit, passion, and persistence. The profession is preparing for those changes and making sure our talent supply will be able to adapt and follow suit,” she added. 4. Promote work-life integration.
Auditing is a naturally high-stress work environment, so it could be a challenge to balance life and work. Punongbayan admitted that he doesn’t regret enjoying a good time with drinking buddies, even when the firm was just starting as “this was the only way for me to keep my sanity in check,” because of the stress at work.
This is one of the reasons P&A Grant Thornton is known for promoting work-life integration. Mailene Sigue-Bisnar, a partner at the Audit & Assurance Division and head of the Markets Group, breaks away from the stereotype of auditors being boring people who do not sleep, especially during tax season. The mother of five knows how to strike a fine balance between her duties at work and in her family.
“When my children were very young, I used to bring them with me to work. There was a small room at the office where we’d put up a tent so they could sleep while I worked overnight,” Bisnar said. “I am fortunate that the firm is supportive, understanding and that the corporate value and my own value are the same.”
5. Create an inclusive environment.
Millennials make up 80 percent of P&A Grant Thornton’s workforce. This diversity fuels efficiency and success in such a cutthroat industry. Baby boomers (the decision makers and upper management) can supply security and tribal knowledge, Gen Xers can contribute by being processoriented and calculating in their approach to decision making, and millennials can offer technological adeptness and creativity.
“I love that this job allows me to help others, manage people and, no matter how lofty it sounds, take part in nation building,” said Yusoph Maute, one of P&A Grant Thornton’s millennial managers at age 27. The magna cum laude from Baliuag University has already been promoted twice since starting as a junior auditor in 2011 and has been sent abroad for training and conferences. “Your job becomes your dream job when you sacrifice and build a strong foundation of hard work and learning.”
For P&A Grant Thornton to continue winning the war for talent, one of the firm’s founders said it must always put people at the heart of the organization.
“Auditing is not something easy to sell like soda. You have to know the person and the company you’re selling to. Your client has to have trust in you and needs to be comfortable with you. You have to develop a relationship – and that’s why machines cannot replace what we do,” said Punongbayan, who at 80 years old, still reports to work almost everyday, sustained by his passion for the firm he has always envisioned to “live for a very long time.”
As published in Philippine Star, dated 12 February 2018