And now we come to the fun stuff. The Government.
Perhaps the most time consuming part of accounting is making sure that you are in compliance with the government. In fact, there is a 8 book set of books that describe the laws that require compliance. Each book has thousands of pages. The 8th book is just the index.
My on-site adviser gave me a question and challenged me to find the answer in one of the books. I couldn't even navigate my way through the index, let alone find the answers I was looking for. Government compliance is a pain because there are so many laws and regulations, and it is hard to follow them all. My adviser told me that before they can really understand the current volume, the next year rolls around and a new volume of books comes out. It's as if they write the laws faster than we can understand them!
As discussed in a previous post, there are many different types of retirement plans. The government has set regulations regarding how much money a company can put into each employee's retirement plan (mostly for tax reasons, they don't want companies to write off a ton of deposits). During this time of the year, we must review all the companies and their plans to make sure they are in compliance. If they fail, we have to make sure they take back the money they deposited (or fix whatever the problem was). This year, we've had a much larger amount of failed compliance tests, which means we have to put aside other projects to make sure the companies pass their compliance before the March 15th deadline.
Government compliance is very important, because we would get in big trouble if we ignored it. Spending tons of time working through the legislation is unavoidable.
I have attached some pictures of these regulations books to show you just how much government regulation there is:
This is the Index:
Thank you for including the visuals; although I can imagine how rigorous the compliance is, the visuals really allow the reader to comprehend its complexity (and to think that there are annual changes, too...wow!). Out of curiousity, what was the question that your mentor posed to you? Also, if a company is out of compliance, what is your procedure to rectify the situation (perhaps, this is a post of its own!)?
ReplyDeleteDo you believe something should be done to address these crazy amount of compliance qualifications? How many tiny nuances are actually needed? And is it likely that by trying to make all these changes annually, the loopholes they might be trying to close are actually worsened?
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