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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.
Are you as safe as you think you are online?
28 Nov 2017“—is feeling excited. Thank goodness for online banking! I didn’t have to leave the house to pay for my plane ticket. #TaiwanSoon ”
[Add screenshot of transaction details and booking confirmation]”
“At the moment: basking under the heat of the golden sun in the turquoise Indian Ocean. Happy birthday to me! #tropicalstateofmind #2weeksvacation #thisisthelife”
[Add photo, add location, set viewing settings to “public” for more media exposure]
Does any of that ring familiar to you? You might have come across those kind of posts in your timeline.
Whether you want to pay your bills, shop for the perfect Christmas gift, check your bank account balances, or simply update your fans about your recent Maldives getaway, it can be done with just a few taps on your mobile phone. In today’s digital age, almost anything is within reach; sometimes it’s already right in your hands.
Unfortunately, so is the risk of having your security jeopardized.
Every time you go online, all our activities and information you post on the internet are being registered and stored: by your browser, Wi-Fi router, Internet Service Provider, search engines, your multiple accounts across websites and in software you use.
Advertising technology or “Adtech” companies, for one, can then gather such information—from harvesting personal data to tracking our online habits via google search history and Facebook likes and shares, to understand what kind of person you are. They then sell these data to advertisers (brands, publishers), who, in turn, supply us with online ads that cater with eerie precision to our specific preferences. (I can attest to that, because I see a lot of dog videos on my timeline more and more each time I click “like” on one). This is probably the reason why Facebook keeps asking us what’s on our mind. Advertises feed on information–and we are more than happy to provide it.
“So they make a living by gathering my information and selling it, and I get targeted ads, what’s the big deal?”
Well you might consider it still fine and dandy when your data propels online commerce and consumption. But enter the hackers and social engineers. Everyone loves social media, including them. And to them, stealing your identity can be a piece of cake—all they have to do is go to your social profile and download images and information profile; they don’t need much, just your email address and birthday will do. Once these people gain access to your account, they can pretend to be you. And you can bid sayonara to your social life as they take over your friends list—betraying your friends’ trust in you, while they further proliferate their evil scheme: taking your friends’ information too, and tricking them into visiting harmful websites that infect their computers with malware, all often coming with a deceptive cute cat images attached.
The reign of terror does not end there. Things can go as far as physical theft. That picture of you on your out-of-town vacation, paired with geolocation, is all that potential thieves require to know that you’re not at home, and won’t be for a while.
Scary, isn’t it? Every day, we expose ourselves to these dangers with each photo we upload, restaurant we check-in online, and even those funny cat videos we like. Someone could even be watching us and we wouldn’t know (yes, laptop and mobile phone cameras can be used to spy on you, if you’re not careful). It can be easy to forget how vulnerable we are being when we think we’re among Facebook friends.
“But why me? I don’t think anyone would ever bother stealing my identity; I’m only an insignificant speck in the vast cosmos.” That may be, but not to hackers. As long as you have personal information they can profit from, you are a prospective victim.
Large influential companies and smaller businesses are no less prone to data breach either—and the latest trend in news speak for it. Case in point: the restaurant app Zomato lately fell victim to information theft when a hacker stole the data of its 17 million users and put them up for sale.
Just this November, the transport company Uber also disclosed it paid hackers $100,000 to keep secret a massive breach last year that exposed personal data from around 57 million accounts. Equifax, one of the America’s three major credit reporting agencies, also announced its catastrophic security breach last September that hackers had accessed people’s names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and, in some instances, driver’s license numbers, as well as credit card numbers for about 209,000 people.
And who could ever forget the classic ComeLEAK? The largest data breach in Philippine history that affected 55million voters in the Philippines, exposing 228,605 email addresses, 1.3 million passport numbers and expiry dates of overseas Filipino voters, and 15.8 million fingerprint records.
The bottom line: the perils of data privacy attacks spare no one—not you, not large businesses, not even the government. Everyone is at risk.
Does this mean we have to go back living under a rock and update our old school caveman drawings instead to stay safe? Thankfully, no. While the threats to our privacy are constantly evolving, so are the safeguards available.
So how can we protect ourselves?
Infrastructures software are constantly being developed, laws legislated, to combat these threats to personal privacy and put individuals in control of their data and enable them to determine what they want to share with whom for specific purposes.
In 2012, the Congress of the Philippines passed Republic Act No. 10173, also known as the Data Privacy Act (DPA) of 2012. Five years later, the DPA’s Implementing Rules and Regulations was put in effect on September 9, 2016, thus mandating all companies to comply. The law aims to “protect individuals from unauthorized processing of personal information that is (1) private, not publicly available; and (2) identifiable, where the identity of the individual is apparent either through direct attribution or when put together with other available information.”
Organizations are swiftly joining the cause and are coming up with their own activities to educate other companies and the public concerned on the nuances of this law and equip them with adequate knowledge on how to protect their information. P&A Grant Thornton for example, is holding a Data Privacy Act Seminar on January 9, 2018 in their Cebu Office to help spread the word in the Viz-Min region.
In addition, articles, digests and other informative materials on how to stay safe online are also abundant on the internet. “Use strong and unique passwords, do not add anyone as a contact that you do not know personally, don’t click on links from anyone you do not trust and do not click on any links that appear random or out of context with your relationship with the sender, browse with a virtual private network (VPN)”–these are just some of the tips given by online bloggers and writers. What they all boil down to, however, is that people can take up arms by educating ourselves on data privacy. When it comes to keeping our information locked and secured, it seems, staying informed is key.
Meanwhile, perhaps you might want to be more critical of your online posts. Sometimes, a picture alone is worth a thousand words—and worth your safety too!
Ms. de Castro is a tax advisory associate at P&A Grant Thornton, a leading audit, tax, ddvisory, and Outsourcing firm in the Philippines and has offices in Makati, Cavite, Cebu and Davao. For comments on this article, please email charlene.decastro@ph.gt.com or PAGrantThornton.marketscomm@ph.gt.com.
As published in Mindanao Times, dated 27 November 2017