Re: Cadetships 2007
sickone said:
can any1 outline the pros and cons of working in the taxation section?
I work in tax - I tend to think it's pretty good.
Some quick thoughts:
* People often think that working in tax early in your career is a disadvantage because it will make you too specialised. This is not true is any way - in my opinion working in audit is far more so. Tax will give you the opportunity to use your accounting skills on a regular basis as you try and reconstruct the journals that gave rise to certain transactions etc etc where as audit is (from what discussions i've had with others) very must solely focused on well, bloody auditing (i apologise in advance for my current hate of auditors but if I get told something isn't material one more time I will flip because all I want is for my numbers to match up - freaking *insert biggest big4 company here*
* Contrary to popular belief tax does know alot (and is growing increasingly) about auditing practices and accounting standard - this is mostly due to AIFRS and the stuffed up things that it does to us.
* You get to do some work for auditors.
* Tax offers a good opportunity if you want to head into the advisory arm because, even as a junior, there are generally lots of opportunities to step away from the compliance side and help out or right advisory letters on often very technical issues.
* Due to the large accounting base, it will help you quite a lot with certain uni subjects.
* There is a lot of variety (i'm in corp tax, but you could also head into the indirect taxes) - consol itrs, individual itrs, trusts, monthly compliance work, fbt, company set ups, ATO reviews if you get the chance.
* I guess a drawback is that it is very technical and you get thrown in the deep end while your still very green (mostly because unlike auditing there aren't very many opprtunities for the 'here spend the next week with this green pen and these spreadsheets').
Umm not really sure what exactly you are after.. throw a few questions my way and i'll attempt to answer them if you would like.