As an ACCA qualified accountant, I have worked in a number of accountancy practices, gaining significant experience, predominantly involving small to medium-sized businesses. I am passionate about my role as a client manager, as I love getting to know clients and their financial goals and aspirations. I am a big believer in the use of cloud softwares to create accounting efficiencies, meaning that our clients have more time to focus on their business.
I also support our clients with their accounting, tax planning, bookkeeping and other compliance requirements. Outside of work, when not spending time with family and friends, I enjoy reading, travelling and collecting Irregular Choice shoes. I am a qualified client manager at Smooth Accounting. Having gained experience in both industry and practice I developed a passion for tax after becoming a chartered accountant.
I believe a key element of my role is getting to know my clients and understand how their businesses operate, allowing me to provide the best advice possible. In my spare time I enjoy playing squash, reading and spending time with family and friends. After my children were born I moved into Accountancy Practice. I enjoy being able to remove the burden that small businesses have, in regards to statutory compliance, so owners can continue to do what they do best, running their business.
Having embarked on a career change after having children, I recently qualified an ACCA qualified accountant. Having recently finished studying, I now have plenty of time to indulge in my hobbies which include reading, running, archaeology and spending time with my family.
I have been working in industry for 8 years and completed my AAT qualification in I am very fortunate to be given the opportunity to join team Smooth whilst expanding my knowledge and skills, I will be doing this within a friendly and supportive team as I continue to study my ACCA. I have worked in practice for the past 5 years and enjoy working in an environment where no day is the same.
I feel very lucky to have been given the opportunity to be part of such a friendly and supportive team here. In my spare time I enjoy spending time with, family, friends and exploring with my son. I have worked in industry for 3 years and after completing my AAT qualification in I am very fortunate to join Smooth Accounting to gain further knowledge and skills in a modern, friendly and expanding environment.
In my spare time I enjoy paddle boarding, travelling and growing my own fruit and vegetables. Head of Digital Media. Social media and video are constantly evolving so there will be always be something to learn. In my free time I enjoy listening to podcasts, stand up comedy and skateboarding. Following the completion of my AAT Level 2 qualification at Chichester college in i joined the team at Smooth Accounting as an apprentice, my goal is to finish my AAT levels and train to become a fully qualified chartered accountant.
I am very grateful to be given the opportunity to join the team and continue studying to expand my knowledge.
When I'm not studying i enjoy going to the gym and swimming to keep an active lifestyle. They have tried to engage directly with corporate boards and management. These have been extremely constructive initiatives. At the same time, voluntary reports inevitably are susceptible to greenwashing. Because the standards are voluntary, neither the standard-setting bodies nor investors have much leverage to stop companies from cherry-picking which metrics to use, essentially customizing disclosures and thwarting the goal of comparability.
And in any event, they are usually unverified, or only weakly verified, with no connection to the audit of the financial statements. In other words, whether through deliberate greenwashing or just haphazard, uneven, and unverified disclosure, voluntary reporting is inadequate to the task at hand. The SEC needs to get involved.
It has a critical role to play in leveling the playing field for investors as well as in ensuring that markets run efficiently on relevant and reliable information.
SEC officials have long acknowledged that climate-related risks can be material, including, most recently, Chairman Jay Clayton in his final testimony before the Senate Banking Committee. The resounding answer after years of trying is that market participants have not been able to solve the problem on their own. As the GAO reports discussed above found, both SEC staff and investors have struggled with inconsistently presented and unreliable disclosures that hinder effective investment analysis.
What is required is a holistic framework for material, climate-related financial disclosures that addresses the full spectrum of information needed to manage and reduce systemic market risk. After all, U. Increasingly, both customer markets and capital markets are demanding net-zero business models and strategies from the companies with which they do business. This is perhaps the single most urgent need from an audit and reliability perspective.
As discussed above, the estimates that companies use in constructing their financial results, positions, and cash flows are sensitive to changes in critical assumptions about the path and pace of changes in energy sources. These changes include technologies that bring the cost of new sources of energy in line with, or lower than, the cost of fossil fuels. They also include regulatory interventions designed to incorporate the cost of harmful GHG emissions into energy costs, driving the effective cost of using fossil fuels up.
Both the providers and users of energy need to use scenario analysis to evaluate the sensitivity of their respective financial results, positions, and cash flows to changes in demand and regulatory interventions.
These companies risk material misstatements or omissions in their current financial reports, as well as potentially materially misguided strategies for the future. Guidance from the SEC on acceptable approaches to such scenario analyses to support financial reporting is essential, and as discussed in the next section, the assumptions and methodologies used in these analyses should be audited.
Those that have adopted strategies should report on the status of climate-related commitments and strategies. Achieving net-zero emissions by will require companies to operate within a total GHG emissions budget.
These milestone disclosures will be an important discipline to motivate companies to adopt robust processes to model and estimate both the amount and timing of future emissions so that they can operate within that budget. The Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials PCAF is a partnership of financial institutions that have committed to measure and disclose financed emissions in a harmonized way to help financial institutions align their portfolios with the Paris climate accord.
The new standard sets forth a methodology for financial institutions to measure financed emissions across six asset classes: listed equity and corporate bonds, business loans and unlisted equity, project finance, commercial real estate, mortgages, and motor vehicle loans. Beyond accounting, the PCAF standard will be the leverage point around which the net-zero commitments of financial firms will flow through to the real economy, as financial firms seek to address the systemic risk posed by climate change.
The implementation schedule of the PCAF standard is ambitious. It requires member financial institutions to begin immediately measuring and reporting their share of the direct GHG emissions known as Scope 1 under the widely recognized Greenhouse Gas Protocol of companies represented in their lending and investment portfolios, as well as indirect emissions related to electricity purchased and used by those companies Scope 2 , with reporting on all other indirect emissions Scope 3 to be phased in over time, starting with the oil, gas, and mining sectors in Companies seeking the services of financial institutions should be concerned that inaccurate or incomplete emissions reporting could jeopardize their financing.
Ultimately, this should include direct reporting of emissions in the SEC filing as well, so that investors can judge and monitor financing risk. Third-party assurance is a critical, underused tool to drive more rigorous and reliable climate accounting and disclosures. In this way, audits can get beneath the surface of management claims in ways that even SEC file reviews cannot, providing market confidence in reporting.
Assurance is urgently needed to improve the rigor and reliability of corporate climate disclosures in time to avoid a serious loss of market confidence in corporate reporting if and when errors and omissions in material, but sloppy or overly rosy, disclosures about climate impacts come to light.
Unless a climate-related disclosure is included in the financial statements, it is outside the scope of the audit, which means it is not tested for accuracy, even if it is financial in nature. But it does not require the auditor to test any information outside the financial statements.
Moreover, the standard applies only to annual reports and does not impose any obligations with respect to any other documents, such as climate or other sustainability reports. The PCAOB has no authority to require issuers to engage their auditors to perform such an attestation, whereas the SEC does have that authority but has never used it.
Some companies voluntarily obtain and provide investors some form of assurance over specific management assertions, predominantly GHG emissions. That assurance varies widely in scope, depth, and quality; usually has no connection to the financial statement audit and may not even be performed by an auditor; and in any event is not subject to PCAOB oversight or auditing standards.
Enormously important investment decisions are made based on what companies say about their GHG emissions. Yet investors must take those assertions on faith alone. The SEC has been too permissive about allowing companies to shield material climate-related disclosures from testing and attestation by an auditor.
It should work with the PCAOB to expand the coverage of the audit to bridge the gap between material climate disclosures and the financial statements in an integrated way. The SEC should encourage the PCAOB to amend its standards to ensure that climate-related financial disclosures are tested and that the results of those tests are taken into account in the financial statement audit.
In addition, the SEC should direct the PCAOB to develop new standards on auditing climate-related scenario analyses; the status of corporate climate commitments; pro forma presentations of what the impact of a policy to achieve net-zero emissions by on their strategies and financial results, positions, and cash flows would be; and GHG emissions.
Without high-quality assurance to validate the rigor of the processes and the reasonableness of the assumptions and estimates used in scenario analyses and reporting on net-zero commitments, disclosures are likely to be superficial and overly optimistic, as they have been in voluntary climate reports to date. Even robust company-maintained disclosure controls—as important as they are—do not replace the need for independent external assurance.
Therefore, the SEC should ensure that the disclosures are made in a way that will provide for them to be assured, either through expansion of the financial statement audit or through new required audit reports to cover additional disclosures. While most of these procedures will primarily call for substantive analytical testing, auditing of GHG emissions should, as with auditing inventory, use relevant technology for measuring and monitoring—for example, by using representative samples of actual measurements at facilities, instead of only the desktop calculations that characterize much of the voluntary emissions assurance conducted today.
Auditor assurance can also help ensure that claimed emission offsets achieve their intended purpose and are properly claimed as offsets to emissions.
Many companies attempt to offset the carbon-producing impact of their operations by investing in programs intended to preserve carbon-absorbing forests. They may also be used to achieve targets that are integral to a climate strategy that is, in turn, integral to the financial statements. These programs are essentially outsourced to service organizations, not unlike outsourced payroll service providers.
This could be an efficient way to verify the legitimacy of claimed offsets and protect the U. Finally, the Securities and Exchange Commission should work with the Financial Accounting Foundation FAF , which oversees accounting standard-setters at the Financial Accounting Standards Board, to address ways in which the existing financial accounting standards exacerbate systemic risk.
This mispricing naturally leads to the misallocation of capital, including the continuing distortions in energy systems that promote climate change. As the federal financial regulator with direct responsibility for oversight of the accounting standard-setters, through Section of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of , 61 the SEC too should examine and address this failure. Outside the United States, the IFRS Foundation has taken note of the role that accounting frameworks play in perpetuating negative externalities and proposed to establish a new Sustainability Standards Board 62 to work alongside the International Accounting Standards Board to improve the consistency and comparability of sustainability reporting.
The IFRS Foundation plans initially to focus on climate risks, given the urgency of the global demand from policymakers and investors. This is a bold initiative that, in a way, will force the SEC to take stock. Of course, integration will be important to address the externalities that are compounded by lack of recognition in financial reporting; indeed, running two sets of standards in silos would not only be counterproductive but could also leave the sustainability standards in the same limbo of voluntary use as they are today.
In many ways, non-U. Addressing the charge of the subcommittee of the U. But the FASB should also prioritize opportunities to improve existing accounting standards in ways that will better prepare U. One area it should focus on is improving accounting for workforce costs. Investors in U.
Human capital plays a critical role in that regard. Moreover, as President Joe Biden has emphasized, ensuring a just transition for fossil-fuel industry and other workers is a necessary step to achieve deep decarbonization and an equitable economic recovery. In contrast, they are disaggregated under IFRS, which means that investors can see how much a company spends on personnel. Emerging research has used the transparency in financial statements prepared under IFRS to discern what portion of non-U.
In the face of the massive disruption of climate change and the transition to a lower-carbon economy, markets want and need to know which companies are in a position to put such value to use in managing through the crisis. Only national regulators have the authority to mandate climate and other sustainability reporting.
The SEC also has the authority, and with that the responsibility, to designate acceptable accounting standard-setters and provide for their independent funding. But much hangs on whether the SEC will use that mandate to tackle the climate crisis or to elucidate other systemic creators or destroyers of value.
Investors and capital markets can only price and manage climate-related financial risks and opportunities if they have access to consistent, comparable, and reliable information.
The SEC has a critical role to play in ensuring that the U. Doing so will help companies, investors, regulators, and policymakers drive a successful transition to a net-zero economy. It does not have to be this way. The regulatory infrastructure to use transparency to give investors and markets the information needed to manage risks is already in place. It just needs to be revitalized. The SEC has all the tools it needs—including its own long-standing rules, guidance, and enforcement mechanisms as well as accounting standards and independent, third-party assurance—to lay out the map and guardrails for corporate disclosures that will both protect investors and let capital markets discipline and enforce risk management.
Samantha Ross is a former special counsel at the U. See U. See ibid. See Total S. Market Risk Advisory Committee of the U. Revolving credit facilities, overdraft facilities, and business loans secured by real estate such as CRE-secured lines of credit are also included. BlackRock has also called for disclosure of Scope 3 emissions in carbon-intensive industries, such as oil and gas. A significant portion of the transition to a low-carbon economy hinges on the eventual retirement of fossil fuels, and it is particularly important for investors to understand the scope 3 emissions profile of oil, gas, and coal companies as the primary source of fuel transitions from carbon-intensive solutions to cleaner alternatives.
Financial System. Colin Seeberger Director, Media Relations. Peter Gordon Director, Government Affairs. Madeline Shepherd Director, Government Affairs. In this article. InProgress Stay updated on our work on the most pressing issues of our time. Fully enforce existing accounting and related disclosure requirements to reflect the financial impacts of the climate crisis and the transition to a low-carbon economy.
Update disclosure, through a staff accounting bulletin and other guidance and rulemaking, to spread identified best practices about material climate-related information across industries and markets.
Leverage the audit to build a solid bridge between climate-related risks and corporate financial reporting. Address the ways in which the existing U. The SEC should enforce existing requirements to reflect climate-related risks. The range of potential material impacts from trends and uncertainties must be disclosed In the Matter of Caterpillar, Inc. The SEC should update its climate disclosure requirements. The SEC should leverage and expand audits to enhance climate-related disclosures.
Audits go beneath the surface of management claims in ways that even SEC file reviews cannot, providing market confidence in reporting. Building on the audit Additional steps regulators should take to provide for assurance over climate-related risk disclosures Issue audit guidance and, as needed, amend PCAOB audit standards to explicitly address, and provide examples related to, auditing climate impacts on financial statements.
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