|
ASIDE
from nursing, the university course to take these days
is accounting.
You see,
the dearth of accountants is so bad that the country’s
top auditing firms aggressively court university juniors
and seniors. Said another way, the smart ones are not
the only ones guaranteed jobs upon graduation with a top
four firm (read: SGV & Co. remains number one while the
gap among numbers two, three and four is narrowing).
Incentives range from internship to payment of school
books and tuition.
At
first, demand came from the United States after the
passage of the Sarbanne-Oxley law requiring stricter
financial reportorial compliance. Then, the United
Kingdom started pirating from the Philippines with the
passage of international accounting standards. These
days, Filipinos are in demand in Dubai and Qatar, where
contractors working on billion-dollar construction
projects are all over the place.
Okay,
okay. The entry-pay level for a fresh accounting
graduate is similar to a call-center agent. The
accountant’s salary and career path, however,
significantly improves after becoming a certified public
accountant and after three year’s experience (read:
that’s when the foreigners start getting interested).
****
Did you
know 1:
In a way, Ralph Recto may be considered a balikbayan
to the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda).
You see,
during his first term as senator, Recto asked Neda to
give him a crash course in macroeconomics which helped
him immensely when he became the main author of the
Expanded Value-Added Tax Law. Despite his laid back
reputation during his student years at De La Salle
University, Neda old-timers said Recto proved to be a
conscientious and quite astute student.
Did you
know 2:
Perhaps because he fears increasingly angry car owners,
Energy Secretary Angelo Reyes goes around town with four
backup vehicles, four uniformed highway patrolmen and
four bodyguards in barong.
The
former head of the Armed Forces of the Philippines,
Angie Reyes is, at best, given a scorecard of seven out
of 10 for determination and zero out of 10 for failing
to rein in the almost weekly fuel increases spearheaded
by the top three oil companies, all foreign owned by the
way (read: even Petron is only 40 percent locally owned
and by the government at that).
The
Department of Energy doesn’t even know at what volume
and value these oil companies are buying their products,
and at what price they are selling even though the law
liberalizing the oil sector requires such weekly
reports.
Did you
know 3:
Compact fluorescent lights (CFL) are selling in
Greenhills and in Divisoria at three units for P100,
which is not even the cost of one unit of branded CFL
sold in supermarkets and hardware stores.
Technically, these are not fakes, since these carry
unknown Chinese brands. Then again, they do not carry
the ICC seal of good housekeeping of the Department of
Trade and Industry for imported consumer products.
CFLs are
currently being pushed by a joint public and private
sectors project called “Switch.” The idea here is to use
the significantly more expensive CFLs instead of
incandescent lights to reduce power consumption and,
therefore, help the environment.
Interestingly, “Switch” gets some funding from the
United States Agency for International Development. One
of the two major CFL brands, GE, is an American company
while the other one, Philips, is Anglo-Dutch. A far
third is German brand, Osram. All three brands do not
have manufacturing facilities in the Philippines. |
