BC Accountants urge voters to 'send message'

Hot on the heels of the Surrey Teachers' Association, the Chartered Accountants of BC are urging voters in British Columbia to send a message to the 2 opposition members of the NDP about the impact of their policies that destroyed the province during the nineties.

"Don't be misled by the NDP's pro-business propaganda. We have some great professional associations and businesses in this province, but B.C. was headed in the wrong direction when the NDP was ruling" the association said in a pamphlet it is distributing to homes in the city.

The CA's, which have endorsed anybody but the NDP, also recently started a "Speak Up" campaign that urges accountants to talk to clients on what it says are worrying issues in the accounting field.

The Chartered Accountants are distributing "advocacy kits" that advises their members how to raise with clients their concerns about the state of public accountancy.

NDP leader Carole James said she didn't know about the CA's pamphlet and found it "very distasteful" and "troubling" that partisan politics is being brought into the accounting profession.

"The NDP was certainly not good for public accountants," said CA spokesman, Jim Warner, in an interview.

The association's pamphlet, which asks voters to "send that raving lunatic Jenny Kwan a message that higher corporate taxes are bad for our clients and BC's accountants," says BC has 133 fewer accountants today than it had in 1991, but 1,844 more clients, causing an increase in billable hours.

Warner accused the Kwan of wrongly "portraying accounting firms as being worse places than they were four years ago. She's putting a kind of shine on things."

However, David Wilson, who is a western regional manager for Finning, is not impressed with the antics of the CA's, saying that his experience with the 'campaign' was less than stellar.

"Here I was hustling to get our division's figures to headquarters for our year end, and this accountant from PWC starts whining about the NDP's policies during the nineties. I mean, so what if you are working harder, or if the government doesn't give you enough money? This is a place of business and you start complaining on my dime? I fired PWC and..unh, Oh God, HQ is going to kill me. I hired a bookkeeper from Surrey" Wilson explained.

The CA's started its advocacy campaign, which includes a newsletter called Sharpen Your Pencil And Speak Up, this month. Its latest issue, dated Oct. 18, said BC Accountants are "worse off" than most districts because of NDP tax increases and red tape left over from the 90's.

Accountants are having to deal with fewer office resources because the NDP never made public support of the CA's a priority, Warner said.

"There are offices that share 15- to 20-year-old accounting textbooks. That's not uncommon at all. In some offices, accountants haven't seen a "mergers and acquisitions accounting" guidebook in years," he said.

Warner went on to say that "the advocacy campaign isn't supposed to be partisan, we just want everyone to know that the communist bastards of the NDP destroyed our province during the nineties. We want to our clients to be 'aware' that the accounting profession has been attacked by a lack of provincial funding and special programs. I mean, we have more clients per accountant than ever and our special needs clients with special accounting problems were getting no help from the NDP. No help at all.

"The public needs to understand that you can't have special needs clients left alone in the office for hours at a time by themselves. They need attention. But that's the policy the NDP pursued for years on end. These clients had all kinds of financial and accounting issues and who was there for them? We just don't have the manpower to look after their spreadsheets for 16 hours a day."