SALY
Posted by
6 Years Ago | 2
We are frequently assigned new projects and tasks that have been performed for years by others. We are told to follow last year’s work papers and essentially carry out exactly what has been done in the past. We call this “SALY” or “Same as Last Year.” SALY is a good place to start. It is not always time-efficient to start a process from scratch when your predecessors have thought through many of the issues and processes.
Nevertheless, I have found that the SALY approach can be risky. Blindly following last year’s work can lead to mistakes and issues missed. Too often I am a new reviewer of work that has been SALY for many years and have wondered why no one has questioned the assumptions made, the process, the issues, or the formulas in the excel worksheets. Progressive tax departments are on a mission of continuous improvement. SALY has its merits, but I have found that there is usually room for improvement in almost all projects.
When handed a SALY assignment, I would recommend the following approach:
· Study prior work papers or memos to fully understand the assignment, the issues, and the process.
· Complete the work based upon SALY as a preliminary step.
· Become fully engaged in the issues and perform additional research on your own for greater understanding and issue spotting.
· If improvements or new issues arise, bring them to your supervisor for evaluation. But, be fully prepared for this discussion. Finding errors or adjusting the process can be difficult for someone to handle and digest – be considerate and polite.
· If necessary, ask for help and input from your supervisor to implement any changes.
By: Paul N. Iannone, JD, CPA, MST
Founder of Tax Career Advisor, LLC and Author of “Extraordinary Tax Career”
Tax Career Advisor, LLC provides customized career coaching for tax and accounting professionals and consulting to C.P.A. firms and corporations.
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Posted by
Community Member
6 Years Ago
Paul, SALY is one of my top concerns. While no one really wants to replicate year-after-year the design and testing of a spreadsheet-workpaper, there needs to be some conceptual checks. First, the preparer should know the topic well enough to do a back-of-the-envelope on what the result should be. Second, build reconciliation checks into the spreadsheet-workpaper (e.g., in calculating tax expense on a long list of pre-tax accounting line items, the reconciliation check is that total tax expense should be total pre-tax income less permanent book-tax differences multiplied by the statutory rate). On all critical spreadsheets-workpapers, there should be two level of review - the line item review where someone goes through and ticks each line and, second, a conceptual review. In the conceptual review, the preparer and the first reviewer convinces the conceptual reviewer that the results are right and this can usually be done using the same back-of-the-envelope approach. Again, another very good article.
Posted by
Paul Y,
I really like your approach of “checks” and “reconciliations.” We always need to ask whether the results make sense and are reasonable. Without these “checks,” there is no standard of reasonableness. Great points.