A new provision in the Act on Public Offers (Ustawy o Ofercie Publicznej) has introduced a new obligation on Polish PIEs to prepare an annual report on the remuneration of the management board and supervisory board and to submit this report to the auditor’s assessment.
Art. 90g of the Act on Public Offering, Conditions Governing the Introduction of Financial Instruments to Organized Trading, and Public Companies” introduces the new Remuneration Report. The supervisory board of a public company must prepare a report on the remuneration of the management board and the supervisory board each year. The scope of the report is specified in the provision cited above. The report has to be “assessed” by a statutory auditor to ensure that the information it contains is accurate and complete.
The first such annual Remuneration Report will be prepared jointly for the years 2019-2020 and the audits of them will be carried out for the first time in 2021.
The Remuneration Report will be prepared separately from the financial statements and the company’s annual report, and its “assessment” will be classified technically as “an assurance service, other than an audit of the financial statements”, and considered by the Regulator as part of the auditing business of a licensed firm. Only registered auditors and their companies licensed to audit Public Interest Entities should be engaged to perform these assurance services. The purpose of the auditor’s assessment is to confirm that the remuneration report contains all the elements required by law. Responsibility for the substantive correctness of the information indicated in the remuneration report rests solely with the members of the company’s supervisory board, and the auditor should be independent to the entity. It may indeed be the same auditor which carries out the audit of the Financial Statements, according to Art. 136 paragraph. 1 of the Act on Statutory Auditors, therefore in most cases it will be the same auditor which you already have.
The above has been confirmed by the Financial Market Development Department at the Ministry of Finance in response to a query by the Chamber of Auditors in Poland (PIBR).
Should you be in a situation where your financial statements auditor is reluctant to carry out this review, they are not obliged to as it is separate to the existing contracts in place currently. You may prefer, for the sake of good corporate governance, to engage a smaller Firm which is able to carry out PIE audits for this task. Please contact us and we will assist you to a good offer from a reputable Firm for the audit, or alternatively if you would like help with the report itself, this ca also be done with Quoracy Consulting and our partners.
For further help, please use the contact form below. It emails direct to me at the audit firm Grupa Strategia, which has been developing a competence in this area in anticipation of the changes.
The Ministry of State Assets has prepared a draft amendment to the Code of Commercial Companies. The project is currently at the stage of public consultations, which will last until September 19, 2020. The changes include introducing regulations to the holding law, but also strengthening the role of the Supervisory Board.
The most important changes are:
The Supervisory Board has the right to request from members of the management board, liquidators, proxies, employees of the company (including those employed under civil law contracts) to prepare or submit any information, documents, reports or explanations needed for supervision over the company. The completion date is set at max. 2 weeks with the possibility of its extension by the Supervisory Board.
introduces the obligation to inform the key statutory auditor about the meetings of the Supervisory Board, the subject of which are issues discussed before the AGM and the obligation for the statutory auditor to participate in such meetings.
The Supervisory Board will be able to appoint an advisor to the Supervisory Board to investigate, at the company’s expense, a specific issue related to the company’s operations or its financial standing.
the principle of open voting of the Supervisory Board is introduced, with the possibility of a different regulation in the statute or the SB regulations.
meetings of the Supervisory Board will have to be convened at least once a quarter (currently three times a year).
the draft explicitly provides for the possibility of appointing Supervisory Board committees. Until now, the provisions did not regulate this issue, with the exception of obligatory committees (eg the Audit Committee).
the role of the chairman in organizing the work of the Supervisory Board was underlined. The statutory requirements for convening Supervisory Board meetings were made more precise.
Invitations will need to contain the information we already provide (date, time and place of the meeting and the proposed agenda
the meeting) and the way of using means of distance communication when holding the meeting. The minimum notice period will be specified in the statutes.
it is proposed to clarify the issue of liability of Supervisory Board members. The draft stipulates that a member of the Supervisory Board should, in the performance of his duties, exercise due diligence resulting from the professional nature of his activity and be loyal to the company. The obligation to keep the company’s secrets will also apply after the mandate has expired.
At the same time, it is proposed to add a provision according to which: “A member of the management board, supervisory board, audit committee and liquidator does not violate the obligation to exercise due diligence if acting loyally to the company, he acts within the limits of justified economic risk, including on the basis of information, analyzes and opinions which, in the circumstances, should be taken into account when making a careful assessment. “
Information courtesy of chudzik.pl, in my opinion an excellent law firm, based in Lodz, for corporate legal and CoSec issues in Poland at the highest level.
From myself, I would just add that this is what is already in place in most advanced economies, and that there is nothing unhelpful, for once, in this draft legislation.
This Latin songstress could be described as something like Shakira meets Rita Ora meets Julio Iglesias. Could be described, that is, if she existed as an actual pop star rather than an accounting mnemonic.
In any case, if you are producing financial statements, you do need to have all of her records. That is, you need to record and disclose the various aspects referred to in each syllable of her name.
TI – Timing
NA – Nature
AM – Amount
PU – Purpose
RE – Reason
These five considerations come up again and again when it comes to putting the narrative blurb into the notes and disclosures of items in the Financial Statements prepared under IFRS, especially any where judgments have been used or estimation uncertainty exists. Her name is a mini checklist for each note which describes circumstance. Often you need to state the range of possible uncertainty, or what would happen if something else happens, but still this tends to be around these basic five aspects.
Location, location and location may be all that is important in real estate development, but this is not a separate consideration here. The When, What, How much, Why and How come are the more apposite of Mr Kipling’s exceedingly good serving men who taught him all he knew in that Elephant’s Child poem rather than Who and Where. Those two kind of get the day off. How on the other hand has to work bouchées doubles, appearing both as the quantum “How Much” and the reason “How Come”.
People may wonder why it is that IFRS standards talk about both Reason and Purpose. Are these two not synonyms of each other? Almost, I would say, but not quite. When I have a purpose, it is a forward looking intention, focused on what I hope to get out of an action, or transaction. When I have a reason, it refers to something that happened that caused the necessity that is being addressed. So for sure both purpose and reason talk about the motivation for a treatment or a transaction in the Entity, but one is a forward-looking aspect of the motivation and the other is backward-looking.
And of course, when we look forward and discuss the purpose of a thing, it behooves us, as managers and auditors also, to consider whether this motivation, this thing which the Entity has promised itself (usually referred to as a Future Economic Benefit (or FEB, as we don’t expect anything to come of it until at least next February) – is it still actual? Is it still just as likely to happen or has something happened since this was mooted that has occasioned the matter to “go south” as the Americans say, or “go pear shaped” as the British say? If so, we are likely to need to revise the value of the item and, at the very least, describe all those circumstances.
So Tina Ampure is just a very small mini-checklist of all these aspects, which it may help you to bear in mind while drafting notes and disclosures or running a check on them. Not only is this abugida-style acronym helpful in IFRS reporting, but also you may get mileage out of Tina in non-financial corporate reporting also.
So, make sure you get all her records…
While I am about it, I will mention some other important points about notes to the financial statements.
They do form part of the financial statements, and therefore you will commonly see at the bottom of primary statements the utterance that “the notes to the accounts for part of these financial statements”
An overriding point other than the Timing, Nature etc, is that they contain enough information to enable understanding of accounts by the people using them to make decisions, and understand them in a way which will help them make appropriate decisions in the area that appertains to them. Likewise, cluttering disclosures with unnecessary information is counter-productive and is therefore frowned upon. I have yet to see someone go to prison for making too many disclosures, but you are unlikely to win in the annual gala of best financial statements in your country, put it that way.
IFRS mandates proper cross referencing of these notes to the financial statements, and also recommends the order be first a statements that IFRS are used (with any exceptions), then a note of significant accounting policies, next the run through of explanations to the line items in the primary statements FOLLOWING THE ORDER of presentation in those statements. Finally all the other disclosures which don’t relate to single line items, eg post balance-sheet events, etc.
If in doubt, try to read the set of notes “in the shoes of” the various class of user of financial statements which the Entity has. Not forgetting, of course, the Competition and the Tax Office.
Accountancy is the language of business. Not always the language of macro-economics which is why that can go haywire, but of business it is. It is the way in which we keep things making sense and not having assets and liabilities which correspond to nothing but someone’s desire that they should be there, with no basis in fact.
If accountancy is our common language and logic in business, then the principles of double entry are like the grammar of that language. Sure, small businesses can get by on a simple cashbook or other prime-entry book but this doesn’t enable these business to draw up proper balance sheets or profit and loss accounts based on accounting language. You can’t make accruals and prepayments in a cash book.
So the simple single-entry language is like a language with no verbs, like baby language in business. And when the business grows to a certain size it cannot do its thinking properly without proper statements and these statements require double-entry bookkeeping to be drawn up.
Once a person has mastered double entry bookkeeping, it enables him or her to be able to assess the consequences of a transaction or an accounting treatment more easily, on the back on an envelope, in a spreadsheet or just in their head. Those business lawyers, tax advisers and others who miss the step of learning double entry usually show themselves up when they are in a room with such as are familiar with and fluent in this language.
The best that you can do is take a simple bookkeeping book and work through it, at first, but the penny is only likely to drop when you have done a few sets of books in real life. This is usually done close to the start of one’s career. Setting some time aside to spend a year or at least six months in a bookkeeping department is time well invested for the rest of one’s career, like learning to touch type or getting your driving licence under your belt early on.
The call to action here, if you want one, is not to skip it if you are early in your career or still studying, not to assume computers will take care of it and therefore you don’t need to understand it. If you are already advanced and feel bad that you missed it, then not only are there books but also courses in LinkedIn for premium members which can help put that right. Or there is night school in the town where you live, which may be the best of all if you live somewhere other than the UK or USA whose atypical systems dominate the approach books tend to take on the topic.
For all businesses and also some non-business organisations in Poland now, there is a new obligation, namely to identify the real ultimate beneficial owners (“UBO”s) onto a central public register. In Polish this is called Centralny Rejestr Beneficjentów Rzeczywistych which is easy for them to say, but not so easy for us, so the form CRBR is an acceptable abbreviation. Literally this means “Central Register of Real Beneficiaries” but we would normally say “Beneficial Owners” or “Ultimate Beneficial Owners” or just UBOs which is like a UFO, but more “boring” than “flying”, unless of course you own something quite valuable, in which case it is not boring at all.
This was all enacted last year with an initial deadline of 13th May 2020 which has now, because of the pandemic, been set back to 13th July 2020, and may well need to be set back further, however at the time of writing the deadline is STILL 13th July 2020, which is a Monday.
The initiative became law by way of enacting an EU Directive on combatting money laundering which goes right back to 2015. This however is a text-book example if you need one, for how the international standard or law in organisations like the EU (not only the EU, but here it has tended to show up the most) is set and then member states have a degree of leeway in how they then put this into local law. There is usually a minimalist approach, but Poland somehow usually manages to show that it is well ahead of the curve by enacting something which is at the top end of how rigorous and bureaucratic it can be, with major penalties, with no real guidance as to how those penalties would be scaled and assessed, without making even logical exceptions (for instance, if the details already published in the KRS – Polish Companies House equivalent – are already public, up-to-date and accurate as a reflection of UBO the you’re exempt, but no, they didn’t do that. And they didn’t exempt even quoted companies which even Russia did when they enacted a version of UBO law which was seen as pretty strict back in 2015).
Part of the interface with the Government portal, which is only available in Polish even though there is no exemption for foreign businesses, moreover it is mainly intended for them. Thankfully, help is at hand…
So this is a great example of how the Polish authorities ride roughshod over business people in order to flex the muscles of the public sector and the state over the private sector muggins who pay for them to do it. They know full well that the business world, which remains in fear and thrall as in the days of yore, will do as they are told, and so they don’t worry too much. There is a computer interface, you have to use that, and you must use your company representative who is entitled to represent you as per the KRS (at which point you say, well if you do look in the KRS then you know that the UBOs are there already, but the answer is “we know what is on the KRS but we don’t know if these are not just nominees, and anyway it was the EU who told us to do this so just do it”).
The matter will be a minor chore for the majority of Polish businesses, but not even all of them. The problem they may have is the interface and the fact that when it comes to signing you need and electronic signature in the form of an ePUAP or a qualified signature, and even though official representatives of Companies are supposed to have these already, in fact they have not all done so, and those who have done so are still not very fluent in their use as they need to use them maybe once or twice a year, so this becomes a bit like expecting someone who goes to Church at Passover and Yom Kippur for weddings and funerals only, say the Nicene Creed and the First Surah from memory and in the original languages when very few people even speak Nicene these days.
Then you get people like us auditors who are using these things most weeks now, but we cannot just go in and do it for you, because it’s: a) not allowed and b) rendered impossible anyway by the very nature of electronic signing. Now imagine how more complex this is going to be for a foreign business especially if the Board are all non-Polish speakers and there is no Polish-speaking general proxy on the KRS or nobody on the KRS who can represent the company has an official electronic signature. Moreover the file has to be in a specific XML format, you cannot just hand in paper or even a pdf. The rules about what constitutes beneficial interest and how you measure it for various business cases are in a series of FAQs which are untranslated or badly translated.
And oh, I forgot to mention, the penalty for failure to do this by the deadline is, at least theoretically,PLN 1 million.
So, this means in practice, even though I know that a lot of UK-owned and other foreign-owned companies in Poland will be fretting about this, neither I no any other advisor, can come to you and say “hey that’s fine just hand it all over and we’ll do that for you and here’s my bill which is all you need to handle”. What canbe done then, meaningfully?
Well, folk like me, UK Chartered Accountants in Poland should be able to (and I definitely am able to) provide a CRBR Walk-Through Service with the following elements:
Feasibility check
Talk to you beforehand to find out in your own language (I’m happy to do this in English, German, Russian, Polish and French) what your situation is regarding the representation, if the people have their PESEL or not, the ePUAP or qualified signature and make sure you are going to be able to make deadline without additional legal actions such as changes to the KRS. These might take a month or more if needed as there are several steps, and may even involve travel in this tough time, so there is no time to waste for that procedure if it’s needed now. If we identify that that’s needed you can take it to your usual company lawyer or I’ll get my own team on it, your choice. This stage may involve checking that you have a valid sig and remember your password to it. In no case will I ask for or see this password.
Information gathering
Talk through the situation re what the Ultimate Beneficial Owner profile is in your Company and how to apply the rules, again in your language, from the list above. If it’s not a typical situation so that research is needed, again you wouldn’t want to leave that to the last minute. In most cases it isn’t, but if you have situations where there are complex groups and offshore structures it can be difficult. (By the way, don’t trouble me if your purpose is to actually do money laundering and get around the law and keep people secret. I have no interest on helping anyone who does this and will not do so, as stated elsewhere on this site. I don’t like reporting people as I do not like to think of myself as an arm of the state, but please do not even put me into that dilemma, just go and find someone desperate enough to assist you. However, as long as you do want to obey the spirit of this law and play fair, and are simply interested in knowing how to do so in a complex situation, then I am happy to involve myself).
Prep the XML, then enter it with you talking through the process Based on the info in 1 and 2, I can go in and prepare the XML file and send it to you, then we talk again and with share screen I show you how to add the XML file, and then go through the signature process if you have doubts about it. Then I explain about taking and keeping the file which proves you have done this and also check that the register now shows what we think it should given the information gathering in part 2.
Concurrent health-check in KRS
While we are about it we can check that the filings in the KRS look in order and up-to-date and if not what needs to be done.
Depending on complexity, I would expect to be able to help you with that walk-through approach as per the above steps for between £200 and £500, depending on complexity, paid half in advance, half on completion. As I mentioned, you don’t have to be a UK or Irish or other Anglosphere business, but if you need the service and speak English, French, German, or Russian, then I can help make sure this is done and keep you safe from the rather draconian fine they are waving in the faces of decent business people.If you are interested in this walk-through service and would like to know more, please fill in the below form and submit it.
Not every organisation has both an external audit and internal audit. In some jurisdictions you can get companies that have internal audit but no external audit, while in most countries you get quite a prevalent external audit with far less incidence of internal audits. Russia is a prime example of the latter case.
External audits done under ISAs are supposed to plan and carry out work in order to have a reasonable expectation of detecting fraud and other irregularities, and certainly the expectation of users has traditionally been that external auditors are responsible for finding fraud.
I work both as external auditor and I also carry out internal audits for clients who don’t have their own departments or who do but still need to be beefed up locally by brought-in experts. Therefore I have no particular axe to grind, but I will say this – a lot seems to be expected of external auditors with relation to fraud without giving them the tools necessary to find instances of fraud.
Internal audit departments can, within reason (they cannot supercede data protection law or labour law, etc, or contravene people’s basic human rights when monitoring them) have whatever tools they like if they are within budget. I can just imagine what my clients would think if I as an external would start installing cameras, GPS trackers on company vehicles, doing spot checks for alcohol, lifestyle checks on managers, and all the other things that internals can do. And yet if you take the standards literally I have to do a job not far off that of a policeman as an external auditor.
All we are usually given as external auditors is a couple of generic questionnaires which we try to go through with the client’s management adapting it to the specifics of their business, then we have the duty and hopefully also the ability to map out and analyse the systems of the client, including the controls and to perform walk-through tests and seek to identify key controls. The way an external auditor assesses a key control and the way an internal auditor assesses a key control are also different in a number of ways, and how we define a key control for our respective purposes differs, and then the timing and frequency of checks on that control will differ. Many people who have worked only in external audit won’t know how or why they differ and therefore their ability to get the best from internal if it is even there will be in many cases limited.
Actually most of the fraud questionnaires in use are a good start because they are based in fact on the fraud triangle originally talked about by notable criminologist Donald Cressey back in the 1960s and 70s. This is the triangle of means, motivation and rationalisation or self-justification. It is based on the idea that if a person hasn’t got the opportunity to get around the system, doesn’t really need to and thinks it would be wrong to, then the chances of that person committing fraud are extremely remote. If on the other hand a person thinks that they know how to get away with it, need the money and also think they deserve to do it, then the fraudulent activity by that person is virtually certain. Various permutations of this give varying degrees of likelihood of fraud. The questions in fraud questionnaires would be good at helping to build a “fraud triangle” exercise in a given context, but only as long as the person doing it knows what they are doing both in theory and in practice. Often it is given to quite junior people to carry out and also very often in assessing audits I have seen that the answers don’t necessarily carry through to specific tests relevant to those answers, but instead increase general risk meaning that there is a likelihood that the sample sizes for other detailed substantive tests (by the way the weakest set of tests for detecting fraud) will be higher. And sometimes you are lucky to even get that much of a response.
Externals go on to make their control tests if they do recognise a key control (and on a worldwide scale I would hazard a guess that tests of controls are still done on only a small minority of audits, with most defaulting to the substantive route based really on lack of time or confidence with control work by the external audit team) and also the other big weapon they have in the arsenal is substantive analytical review. But SAR is only as good as the in-depth knowledge of the branch or business, so externals – especially those which are not branch specific as some Big Four externals are – don’t really have the sector knowledge that the internal audit team have and so their chance of noticing something that doesn’t stack up as they go through their analyses of ratios, or building of expectations and confronting to reality is not as good as that of the internal in many cases.
And then auditors finish every section by mopping up whatever needed assurance they could not derive from the earlier procedures by other substantive procedures based if done properly on a statistical sample, which is designed to get them from the assurance they got from less time-consuming procedures through to within their tolerable error (a function of risk and materiality from their perspective, which again differs from the internal auditor’s perspective which may not even be couched in money figures but in non-monetary terms). However the chances of getting at fraud looking through sampled accounting documents is miniscule, and here many external auditors do the bulk of their work.
So naturally if there is an internal audit team, an enlightened external auditor should be ver anxious to understand how they decided their work plan, what they did, and how many key controls have been checked thoroughly and how many risks are still open. If they want to give the organisation real value for money they will design tests that supplement, rather than duplicate the work of internal auditors.
Internal auditors will encourage this – they too will want to see that the organisation’s budget for external audit work goes on procedures that help to improve the risk heat map and the overall picture for the organisation. This call only be done when each side understands the other and “speaks their language”. Many internals have worked as external but not many are continually doing both types and therefore able to think through an assurance issue from both perspectives.
The National Audit Office building, built originally as the Imperial Airways Empire Terminal. The statue, “Speed Wings over the World” is by Eric Broadbent” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
According to page 2 of today’s UK Financial Times, a UK National Audit Office report shows over 6.5m people waited more than 10 minutes to get their calls answered by HMRC, adding £33m to customer’s phone bills and wasting £103m of their time last year.
This snippet of information triggered a few things that I wanted to say to you this morning. The first of these is, that, despite the fact that it is obviously pretty dire that people need to wait so long to get their calls answered by the service they are paying taxes to fund in the first place, at least in the UK there is a body which is concerened at the loss of time and places a value, in monetary terms, on that loss of time by the customer.
Anyone who has spent any time either in government offices, or even banks or supermarkets in this part of the world will probably confirm that the idea that the customer’s time is valuable and should be respected is a rather alien concept. Not so long ago it was an utterly alien concept, but even today it is still a concept which they find rather hard to grasp.
Not as bad as China, though, from what I heard and also saw. People being expected to queue all day outside the Chinese consulate for their visa and then at the very moment that the scheduled closing time of the office came the shutters come down like with Kiosk Keith and that was that. The spare time of the employees was utterly sacrosanct, that of the customer not at all. This of course shows an elitist mentality, which can be found in almost all state sector offices to one or another degree anywhere in the world. Expect it and try somehow to deal with it.
Much less acceptable is the wasting of the customer’s time in business. If the customer is paying then they have a right to have their matters expedited and people who keep people waiting ought either to invest in more infrastructure to avoid it or to wonder if they are in the right business. Continue reading “The Money Value of Time”→
This Latin songstress could be described as something like Shakira meets Rita Ora meets Julio Iglesias. Could be described, that is, if she existed as an actual pop star rather than an accounting mnemonic.
Accountancy is the language of business. Not always the language of macro-economics which is why that can go haywire, but of business it is. It is the way in which we keep things making sense and not having assets and liabilities which correspond to nothing but someone’s desire that they should be there, with no basis in fact.
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