The GAAPweb blog

Interim Results

Do you describe yourself as ‘results-orientated’? If so, being an interim could be right for you. Although the word interim means ‘temporary’, interim managers are much more than temps; they’re employed to get fast results and to help organisations effect change, sometimes in turbulent times.

In the finance and accounting world, this could mean project managing a computer system implementation, turning around the performance of an underachieving team or stepping in when a senior person leaves.

The potential rewards are high (with daily rates ranging from £300 to £1,000 for a senior director level interim), but so too are expectations. Interims are expected to hit the ground running and make a difference almost immediately – there is unlikely to be a ‘settling in period’ or any long induction. The expectation is that an interim understands the brief, creates a plan to achieve the desired result and executes it more or less flawlessly before leaving and moving on to the next role. And all this while remaining aloof from the politics and knowing both the end game and date.

This might sound insecure, and it is; interims who don’t get results can be terminated fast. Anyone considering becoming an interim should be confident that they can deliver and be happy to live without the security and benefits that come with a permanent job. Given that even the most seemingly secure permanent jobs aren’t secure in this economy, many finance and accounting professionals won’t see that as a downside. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) are predicting that more than 600,000 people will be made redundant in 2009, so a permanent job doesn’t necessarily provide what it says it will: permanence.

I have worked as an Interim Finance Manager on and off since 2003, and for me, the benefits outweigh any downside. My assignments have included improving the customer service provided by the transaction processing department of a large bank, temporarily managing a payments team for a well-known telecoms company and being a safe pair of hands for a forty-strong finance team in the travel industry. My next role is covering a manager’s maternity leave, and I’m looking forward to learning about a new industry and managing a new set of people and challenges.

If you like meeting new people, enjoy change and appreciate the freedom of leaving once a result has been achieved, then being an interim could be for you. Companies are usually looking for people with specialist knowledge or experience (mine is operational management of payables, receivables and payments teams) or experienced senior managers, usually those commanding a permanent salary of more than £50k. Interims are expected to employ an umbrella company such as Parasol, or to take specialist accountancy advice about setting up a limited company before starting a contract to legally maximise tax benefits.

Being an interim works for me. I enjoyed more than ten weeks off in 2008/9 after a year-long assignment (although it was, of course, unpaid), and I am now refreshed, recharged and looking forward to the next challenge. And when the next contract ends in December 2009, I’ll say thanks, well done, Happy Christmas and gladly move on.

Louise Graham spent five years working for The Walt Disney Company before taking a break to have her two children. Since then she has worked on an interim basis for Abbey National, First Choice and The Carphone Warehouse. She is about to start an interim role with a leading property management company.

If you would like to contribute to the GAAPweb blog, please send your submission to natalie.harris@tmdr.com and we will be pleased to publish it, subject to suitability.

Don’t overtax the issue, Gordon

Lurking in the depths of a Da Vinci Code-style vault, shrouded in Swiss secrecy, is a big bag of tax-free swag that costs the UK somewhere between £4 to 13 billion per year. Well, it’s something billion. Nobody’s really too sure. Either way, it sounds like a lot and Brown, Sarkozy, Merkel et al suddenly seem very eager to get it back.

President Obama’s legislation to stop offshore tax haven and tax shelter abuse (cannily entitled The US Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act) has shaken Swiss banking giants UBS to the core. It demands that they not only pay back tax deficits to the US, but that they hand over the fortified names of hundreds of their mysterious account holders, a fair number of whom I suspect are British.

With UK havens like the Isle of Man, Guernsey and Jersey under Obama’s spotlight, I can feel the reverberation from Brown’s knee-jerk reaction as he edges his toes out of neutral waters and decides to finally do something about tax avoidance. But is it too little, too late? And more importantly, is his assault on world greed targeted in the right place?

It’s no secret that the über-rich have been filtering their bonuses, mortgages and spousal ‘gifts’ in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and Monaco for decades. It’s also no secret that the rest of us (particularly financial professionals) have been increasingly looking for work in other tax havens like the Middle East to avoid (note – not evade) paying that irksome amount that comes out of our pay packet each month.

Lumbering the offshore industry together into one, ‘tax haven’ package is essentially adding another layer of confusion to the already cloudy haze pervading tax avoidance. As soon as one tax loophole is sloppily patched up, another one opens.

I’d like to see the rules on tax avoidance made clearer through the implementation of an all-encompassing, general anti-avoidance rule (GAAR) – although this has already been dismissed a few years ago as being too ‘uncertain’. What, more uncertain than our current tax laws? Really?

With the G20 summit in London just around the corner, European leaders have already been discussing (without going into detail, naturally) how best to reform the European Union Savings Tax Directive and how to implement universal policies that will prevent the world’s rich from getting richer.

All very nice, but I can’t help but agree with the comments made by the Director of the European Centre for International Political Economy Fredrik Erixon after the recent mini G20 meeting in Berlin, in which he stated that “they couldn’t agree on something more substantial so they went for the easy targets: tax havens and hedge funds”.

I am not for a moment condoning unfair tax practices that engender a ‘one rule for us, another for them’ approach. Obama is perfectly correct when he outlines this issue as one of “fairness and integrity”.

But in UK terms, tax havens (and all associated complications) just seem like a rather obvious target, or worse still, diversionary tactic from other more critical financial issues. I can’t help wondering if Mr Brown’s attention is better spent elsewhere.