Professor Elam

Tell Fritz

You can't make  this stuff up

Dave Barry, Jeff foxworthy

Tell Fritz is the new website allowing customers to 'get in touch' with Fritz, the CEO of GM. 

but it gets better, this is  a quote

"One of the new frontiers in the auto industry will be true customer service," Henderson said. "We're committed to responding to consumer market trends."

Gee where have they been as the foreign makers invaded?

We study customer relations in managerial accounting, TQM, CQM, geez, perhaps this is why GM  is in trouble, ya think?

Outliers and Black Swans

I am not quite sure where Pat Buchanan stands in the politicial spectrum but he seems to stand alone. While the rest of the columnists are writing about Sotomayer, Michael Jackson, health care,and the wonder of two engined automobiles (hybrids), Buchanan at least has more of a world view.

quick now the Turkic speaking  Ughurs are

 rebels in the Underworld of the Ring Trilogy
the ancient people who gave rise to   Valdemort in the Harry Potter series
an oppressed group in now Chinese dominated border territory in an oil rich region

Indeed the last choice is why the Chinese 'president' broke off his meeting with the G 8 and returned home

Maintaining empire since the days of Alexander the Great has been a matter of oppressing folks that did not want to be in the empire, that is the topic of Buchanan's column. Here in the US the South did not want ot overthrow Washington DC, it just wanted out, but it was not to be. We have a new Civil WAr, as the prosperous southern US will be called upon to support the failed business models of Michigan and California. How long will that last?

Read the linked column, these are foreign, indeed, names to most US citizens. The books Outliers and Black Swan argue that seemingly unrelated, insignificant events can have great impact, indeed, put people in houses they cannot afford, guarantee their mortgages, and poof, bye bye to Merrill and Lehman. Chide Arthur Andersen, and poof, an 85,000 person cpa firm is gone overnight.

It is important to read things you may not agree with and particularly to read from a foreign perspective. While Buchanan is located here, this column is a perspective first suggested in Nesbitt's Megatrends 2000. He said ethnic people the world over would be going back to their original languages, breaking free of their oppressors.  Sure enough look what has  happened.

Forsythe's novel The Devil's Alternative describes an assasination in the Ukraine that leads to a near break up of the Soveit Union, it was written in the late 1970s. The Soviet Union did break up just ten years later

WW I began just this way, as he says, Africa will offer no lack of such brushfire wars. Which could be the next Black Swan?

An Orderly Wind Down

Opus West filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Nothing unusual about that these days but

what issues does this raise for the outside auditor? What will fair value be?  What is an empty office building in a recession worth? What would you want the owners to guarantee if you were the outside auditor?

Another dimension of the outside audit is client selection. Would you want Opus as a client?

What is a super priority lien in bankruptcy court?  Would you know to ask for one?

Are you familiar with the fair value rules, impairment tests?

This auditing thing is getting a lot more difficult. 

United Breaks Guitars

Dave Carroll  finally had to pay the $1200 to fix his guitar, broken courtesy of United Airlines. All his complaints were ignored, what's a musician to do?  Hmm how about recording a song and put it on You Tube?

Well click to see what 

Don't get mad

Get Even can mean...

United apparently is now paying attention, Dave made the national news with his song, 

The message here is that one can speak out and be heard given the new media. It allows everyone to speak out. 

California Ethics Woes

Community College officials face serious charges for misuse of funds and channeling money for various bond elections. 

It never ceases to amaze me.  Whenever I teach ethics three times now, there is no lack of current ethically challenged officials making the news. One never needs to save articles so that there is material to demonstrate the problem to students. 

Of course the lawyers for the officials are denying anything was done incorrectly. But the DA brought the case, and this is after all California where it seems to take quite a bit to break the law when it comes to government spending. 

Prof Elam Presents to San Antonio Internal Auditors

One of my goals as your Professor of Accouting is to reach out to the business community of San Antonio. I want that community to know we are here.  In that regard I will be making a presentation at the July monthly meeting of the San Antonio Chaper of the Institute of Internal Auditors.

This will be Wed July 8, networking at 11:30 CPE session featuring fascinating presentation by yours truly at Noon.

Students are welcome and urged to attend. This would be a good chance to network with area professionals.

This hotel is at the NE corner if I 10 and NE 410 BUT to access the hotel it is necessary to be traveling west on the 410 access road headed to I 10. If you go north of I 10 there is no exit for the hotel and backtracking is most difficult.

Further I have invited Arlena Sones, Presdient of SA IIA to speak to our intermed class.  Date to be announced.

Internal Audit Quote of the Week

As Jeff Foxworthy says, you just can’t make this stuff up.

 

In the article on the front page of the SA paper yesterday Sunday July 5 the vice chancellor of the Alamo CCD makes this comment

 

James McLaughlin pitched cutting a position in the internal auditor’s office, saying his staff could not keep up with the drumbeat of reports each identifying some new problem to fix.

 

“When you pick up a rock, there are 1,000 snakes and every snake has babies,” McLaughlin has said of district operations. “

 

Prof Elam observation - The job of an internal audittor is to identify the highest risk an entity faces, propose solutiknos, and then hopefully the risk is reduced.  Clearly the reactino of the VC is forget that, stop the reports I do not want to hear bout itl.

 

Perhaps that internal auditor should be transferred to James office to help out….

Total Quality Management

Decades ago the modern grocery with wide aisles and shoppers pushing carts about did not exist. 

The shopper faced the grocer who was behind a counter. The grocer requested an item and the grocer went to the shelf and retrieved it.  This gave way to the multitude of items in stores todays with shoppers making their own decisions. No doubt studies revealed people would buy more on impulse, and well we can stand the pilfering. 

Today's point, in many cases the original method may have had it right. I had one of those

'some assembly required projects' which nearly always requires a trip for more fasteners. 

These days there are SAE and Metric as well as both coarse and machine threads. Open bin containers at the Big Box Hardware coupled with unsupervised children are a disastrous formula. As you may have noticed most children in stores have roughly the same supervision as wild hyenas descending on a hapless wounded zebra.  (Editor, Prof Elam please keep such editorial comments to yourself, they hardly add to the pedagogy..) (Elam, been to a store lately?)

At any rate the helpful store clerk bemoaned that children and shoppers would of course mix the sized all up so it was impossible to tell what was what in which bin. And then when the shopper got home with the wrong a mis match, the clerks got blamed. 

The better idea here would be the original. Put all the nuts bolts screws, nails behind a counter. Position two knowledge able store clerks behind the counter. The result would be satisfied shoppers and much much better inventory control as well as fewer mis matches.   

The problem with TQM is that we can explain it to management but as you noted in your essays, they ignore the better idea and go cheap anyway. What good does it do to leave with the mis matched bolts?

The Hollows Replies

A couple of posts back I described my difficulty in attempting to pay my apt rent. 

Today, Sunday, they actually called me back, I had sent an e mail.  the young lady attempted to explain the bizzare reasoning behind shutting the mail drop, I was on the cell and it missed me. She also allowed that two days a week someone was in the office by 8"30, and they stay till 7 PM.

Well that's a start...

California Dreamin'

George Will describes Meg Whitman, ex E Bay CEO, and her run for the Republican nomination for Governor. 

Now CA is paying vendors with IOUs, as always an interesting read from George.