Round 3 with the Tax Guys...

Today was round 3 with the tax guys. And I knew from the beginning that they would be digging out a ton of stuff. On the other hand it is their job to do that. The point here is not to blame someone, but to point out what's going wrong during the year, what could be done better and how to avoid mistakes like that.
With that being said, I keep a perspective about what they dig out. If that what they find is under 10% of the entries during the year, that would be a normal quote for accounting mistakes. And I woudldn't worry too much about it. But then of course there are those mistakes that are kind embarassing. Payments with missing invoices, invoices numbered wrong or not put in the folders in numerical order, those are unnecessary mistakes. When it comes to some of the accounting errors they are partly due to interpretation. We see it one way and the tax guys see it another way. In the end we have to find common ground and figure out a way how to avoid that in the future. And then there are those things that are clearly worng, because the exenses have been recorded on the wrong accounts and some have been put in the wrong class. Those are the things I was not particularly happy about. Mistakes like that can happen, but it should have occured to my co-worker who prepped that paperwork, that here seems to be something out of order. But he didn't see that and that's actually an embarassment. And it's a given fact if a tax guy findes a couple of unnecessary things than they start to look way more carefully than they would be doing otherwise.
When the tax guys were talking to me, I do agree with them that things like that should not be happening and I try to figure out a way how we could avoid that in the future. Most of the corrections were be given to me, since it is pretty much second nature for me to make those changes. It is immediately clear to me what needs to be done and I've corrected that in no time. My co-worker on the other hand seems to take al long time. It's not quite clear to him what needs to be done. He seems to be slightly confused when he has to correct the amount including the tax, the amount with no tax and when the whole tax needs to be changed and when he just has to record a tax correction. At first it was not quite clear to me why he has problems with that. But it seems to be the way those kids learn accounting these days. They all learn it now on computers and therefore they are missing part of the understanding. I learned accounting on paper and therefore it is clear to me what accounts are being touched when they are recorded, regardless if I physically see them during the process or not. Therefore my understanding of the matter is different as when someone never ever had to do that on paper. And then of course I've been involved with accounting for almost 25 years and I've worked it from many different angles, therefore you have and entirely different understanding of the matter. My co-worker was already so down, that the tax guys and I agreed that I should be doing most of the corrections, otherwise he might think he can't do anything right and might just throw down the towel and quit. The thing I didn't tell my co-worker is that fact that he didn't balance the transfer accounts and that the didn't even attempt to balance the open positions on the liability side and on the outstanding debts. From a accounting point of view it's pretty much a mess. But I didn't tell him that, I figured once we're done with this years tax paperwork I will sit down with him and try to explain to him the proper way to deal with those during the business year and what prep-work has to be done before the tax guys get their hands on it.
Shortly before the work day ended we had a talk about accounting. Turns out that he thought with having attended 5 years of Merchants-Academy he just would sit down do some accounting and it would all be right. And it came as a complete surprise to him that he actually knows very little about the way acoutning is being done in a real company and in real life. And he was really completly down and depressed and he might have realized that he being 22 and coming right from school and having to deal with our somewhat complicated system accountingwise, might not exactly what you call a happy fit. I've known that for some time, but it's not my place to point that out. What I told him is that he needs to give himself time to learn how accounting is being done in real life and that doesn't happen over night. I do hope that I talked him out of quiting, since there were situations during that day when I wasn't sure if he's gonna stay or quit.