I'm Steve, I Love My Job....(1)

As an employee, you probably rarely visit your own company's website. But you should, it's highly entertaining or depressing. I particularly find "Careers" pages to be highly amusing. There is so much BS and "sugar coated" material there to make you want to barf for days. What we often see are "United Colors of Benetton" type layouts of a culturally diverse organisation of all genders, ages, races and religions, with many happy campers spewing out testimony of how great everything is and how the organisation has furthered their career or richly rewarded their contributions.

Since it's slow in the news department, I ambitiously embark on a multi-part series to tell you what it really like.

Let's start with the Trust Accounting team.

Unless you are an individual trustee, then you likely have an accounting team. There is probably 1-2 accountants for every Trust Manager.

It used to be that the accounting area was an unsightly mess. Stacks of paper, ledgers, receipts, invoices and statements strewn all over the place. The team took up more floor and cabinet space than everybody else. Everything used to be done manually and the clicking noise of calculators would drive you crazy. Every day, boxes of even more paper would be delivered. You needed to store boxes of documents offsite on a regular basis. Then they took up all the computers and hogged the printers, photocopiers and scanners.

Nowadays, you may not even know where your trust accounting team is! They may be at some low grade office space in another part of town or sitting in Guangzhou or Mumbai. You may not even have an accounting team....the work is outsourced to some service provider. Of course there are still some trustees that seem to forget that preparing accounts is one of their duties and dispense with this function all together.

And of course much of the work is automated or computerised and digitally scanned. We get live feeds from the asset managers/traders/brokers, daily feeds from the bank, etc. Valuations and exchange rates adjustments are computed automatically and you can get instant financial statement printouts that used to take months to do. As such, the function is more or less occupied by junior data-entry clerks. Due to the sheer volume of data, the accounting team still represents a large number of staff but still won't cost you as much as a senior Wealth Planner will.

Having a bookkeeping qualification is good. Being a professional accountant is nice but probably a little overkill unless they are the department head. There are probably only a handful of accounting treatment issues that pop up during the year that require a pro to handle. Still having a Chartered Accountant may not solve all your problems as most accountants have little if any training on trust/estate accounting and few if any understand the structure they are accounting for. So the good news is that you won't have to read or understand trust deeds to be a trust accountant. When's the last time you took your accounting people to a meeting with the client? Do you think they understand the potential implications of booking a loan to/from the trust? Have your accounting staff ever been allowed to go to STEP conferences or Trustee Association seminars? Only few even get to go to accounting seminars. Of course, even when they "blow it" and make an accounting error, who ever detects it? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it.....

Occasionally, the client/settlor/beneficiaries may actually read the trust accounts you send them. Most often not, as it is historical information and if the trust is only holding a portfolio then the bank statement is a more useful and updated source of information the trust accounts. Some may have questions. They stupidly ask their
Trust Relationship Manager who is absolutely clueless because they have had nothing to do with the accounts. We now have several generations of trust administration people that have never prepared nor can they interpret trust accounts because it's not part of their job description. This disjoint in service delivery is a perhaps a little embarrassing but 90% of the time, it's harmless, just transfer the call to Rajesh in Mubai. The remaining 10% usually leads to the trust accounts and ledgers being Exhibit B in a litigation/tax investigation case.

There are pretty much 4 scenarios when the trust accounting department gets recognition: when they're late on delivery; when they screw up the accounts; when they lose data; or when their time costs exceed budget. As the trust accounting head, you will be constantly asked to make the accounts "prettier", more user-friendly, more colourful more charts. If you're a bank trustee, then you will be asked to choose some accounting policy to hide or defer investment losses and bank/trustee remunerations so as not to embarrass the private bank or arouse fee disputes. You need to promptly recognise any earned, realized or contingent investment gains/income. Trust capital can only increase and must never decrease. Create your own GAAP as required.

The work is usually stable and promotions static. Offhand, I can't think of any trust accountant making it beyond the accounting department so I think your career path is Head of the team or the streets. The good news is they're likely always hiring in Mubai.