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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
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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
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Many Grant Thornton member firms provide a range of inspirational and generous services to the communities they serve.
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Fresh Graduates
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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.
Dirty money
31 Oct 2018I was in early primary school when I first heard the song Magic Penny. The lyrics say “Love is something if you give it away… It’s just like a magic penny. Hold it tight and you won’t get any…”
In its entirety, the song is about sharing and receiving love. However, it does briefly mention the lyricist’s two cents on money management: It is essential to move our money to benefit from it.
We use money to buy necessities, comforts, and luxuries. We send money as financial assistance to our families. We invest our extra money, because a penny in the pocket would be the same penny no matter how long it stays there.
If not moving money is unwise, is frequently moving it better? Yes, but only if the reasons would not put one in hot water with authorities.
Have you heard about dirty money? This is money derived from activities like trafficking of drugs, firearms, and women and children; smuggling of goods and endangered animals; illegal gambling; theft; prostitution; and other illegal trades.
Has someone ever asked you to receive on his behalf unusually large sums of money that made you suspect where the money came from? And then the next day, were you told to use the same money to pay for your supposed long-outstanding personal loans in installments over the next few months to another individual you have never met? And because of the personal favor given to you,, you brushed off further verifying the source of the money and agreed to proceed with the installment loan payments? If your answer is yes, then congratulations! Your willful blindness has now made you a money launderer’s accomplice!
Money laundering converts dirty money to clean money, and the prior example is one of the many ways it can be done.
In response to the increasing threat of money laundering in the country, the Philippine government has recently introduced a more expansive set of anti-money laundering guidelines in the form of Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) Regulatory Issuance (B) No.1, Series of 2018, “Anti-Money Laundering/Counter-Terrorism Financing Guidelines for Designated Non-Financial Businesses and Professions (DNFBPs)”. DNFBPs refer to businesses and professions that include money servicing businesses (MSBs), casinos, car dealers, jewelry dealers, real estate companies, lawyers, and accountants.
With the new anti-money laundering guidelines, the Philippine government acknowledges that DNFBPs play an important role in efficiently moving money in our country and may contribute to the risk of money laundering. For example, there is no denying that MSBs like over-the-counter remittance centers in pawnshops and couriers, and online remittance services, such as PayPal, have become an increasingly popular alternative to sending money through bank transfers, because of their lower fees and higher accessibility to the masses. In some Philippine towns, they probably outnumber banks and are more strategically located in places that people visit regularly, such as department stores and local markets.
DNFBPs are expected to establish formal anti-money laundering policies and processes designed to detect, investigate, and report money laundering at its placement stage. This stage is when cash is first introduced into the financial system and money laundering is at its most susceptible state of being discovered. DNFBPs need to be registered with the AMLC by December 2018.
The success of this policy is far from assured, though. Money laundering is not an easy crime to catch because the intent to deceive is executed in a series of complex transactions. The illicitness of the source becomes masked once dirty money is used on legal activities.
As individuals, we can be key players in the success of this anti-money laundering effort. Our personal decisions dictate whether money laundering gets caught and reported, or not. Our decision on whether we want to be involved mainly hinges on the assurance of personal safety. For instance, those working within the DNFBP sector would be more interested, and concerned, about how safe it will be to report money launderers and terrorist financers to the AMLC. Will they be provided with adequate protection from retaliation (if their employer is a suspected money launderer) or even against the threat of death (if a DNFBP customer is a potential financer of terrorist activities)?
Supporting government programs such as a law protecting whistleblowers, an effective national ID system, and a centralized credit investigation bureau may strengthen the new anti-money laundering guidelines. Ultimately, however, our willingness to participate in this campaign will drive the success of the implementation of these guidelines. We also need an adequate understanding of how money laundering works so we can identify and report it at the earliest time.
Or, we can turn a blind eye, become part of the crime, and be continually haunted by it. If we choose this path, then we will not be any different from a penny in a pocket suspended in an eternal state of sameness.
Mark Anthony Basa is a managing consultant in the Advisory Services Division of P&A Grant Thornton.
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As Published in The Manila Times dated 31 October 2018