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IRWIN C.
Nidea Jr. sought occasions by which he could express
himself.
But as a
tax lawyer of one of the four largest accounting firms in
the Philippines, his venues for self-expression were
limited.
While his
job did involve writing, the subjects he covered dealt
with matters esoteric and confidential, comprehensible
only to him, his colleagues and the firm’s clients, most
of which were corporations that felt—rightly or
wrongly—entitled to tax refunds from the government.
Last
November, after working for more than three years at
Punongbayan and Araullo (P&A), Nidea decided to take a
break from his daily grind.
Instead of
issuing tax opinions and crunching numbers, he attended a
writing workshop organized and facilitated by author and
newspaper columnist Barbara Gonzales.
Fully
funded by the accounting firm, the weekly writing workshop
was held for two-and-a-half months for four hours each
session. An estimated 20 employees, including the firm’s
midlevel managers, participated in the half-day workshop.
Initially,
Nidea didn’t think that the program would amount to much.
He was
wrong.
During the
first meeting, Nidea was already excited by a
word-association exercise, stimulating him and other P&A
employees to write.
Eight
sessions and a number of exercises later, Nidea and his
coworkers produced a chockful of essays, stories and
poems.
The tax
lawyer, for his part, chose to write “Four Precious Jewels
and a Golden Thread,” a poem about the emotional loss he
felt as a child everytime his father, an overseas Filipino
worker, left his family to pursue his career abroad.
In
attending the workshop, Nidea was able to unleash his
inner writer, proving that there was more to life than
credits and debits, assets and liabilities, top lines and
bottom lines.
“I only
wanted to become a good lawyer. I wasn’t expecting that I
could be more human,” Nidea told the BusinessMirror,
referring to the program’s benefits.
Meanwhile,
Gonzales, the workshop’s facilitator, was so impressed by
the intensity of Nidea’s poem that she included it in her
column a few days before Christmas last year.
When Nidea
learned that his poem was published, he was taken aback.
No one thought that tax advisors such as himself could
produce works that could see print.
Despite
his initial writing success, Nidea will not be pursuing a
different profession anytime soon.
After all,
Nidea, like other similarly inclined employees, is
encouraged to practice creativity at work by helping
produce the company’s internal electronic newsletter,
which includes a lampoon issue.
In one way
or the other, allowing employees to indulge their
interests at the office has helped P&A boost worker
retention and loyalty, especially given the global
competition for talent.
But by
far, besides attractive compensation, P&A’s secret in
helping keep employees loyal is in its training programs.
Approximately one-third of its overhead costs are allotted
to improve the skills of its employees.
“This
includes training inside and outside the office, here and
abroad,” Gregorio S. Navarro, P&A managing director and
chief executive, told the BusinessMirror.
Not only
has the company covered the dollar-based tuition of three
employees currently taking up their Masters in Management
at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM), it has also
shouldered expenses of its executives enrolled in a
yearlong global exchange program spanning three
countries—Belgium, the UK and the US.
“Every
year, every member of the staff is trained as much as
one-and-a-half to two months,” Navarro said, adding that
training covers even clerks, messengers and utility
personnel.
Primarily
consisting of core business subjects such as tax clinics,
a few training programs—as shown by the writing
workshop—also encourage right-brain thinking, giving a
positive interpretation for the term “creative
accounting.”
Customer
service
ALTHOUGH
it has always encouraged employees to use the right side
of their brains, Punongbayan & Araullo has not lost sight
of its goals.
Besides
continuing to insist on providing customers with topnotch,
world-class service, the accounting firm has also
emphasized a clear-cut, no-nonsense professional work
ethic designed to enhance employee performance and
responsibility.
“The
minute we hire someone, right from the very beginning, we
emphasize quality work, responsiveness and hard work,”
Navarro said, paraphrasing the company motto—integrity,
quality, excellence.
These
three concepts are not mere buzzwords cited to make the
company look good. Nor are they used to pay lip service to
certain ambiguous corporate ideals.
To
underscore the value of its practice and the importance of
its customers, the company has devised and enforced
policies regarding office matters both big and small.
Take phone
calls and e-mail messages. Any e-mail message received by
any P&A employee is required to be answered within the day
and no later than two days. If the matter is complicated
and needs further consultation, the reply is supposed to
indicate a date when the recipient should expect another
message.
A similar
set of regulations covers phone calls. A phone is to be
answered within three rings. If the person being called is
unavailable or is otherwise indisposed, s/he should return
the call within four hours.
“We tell
our clients and the public that our office hours are from
8 to 12, and from 1:30 to 5:30. If you call us, expect us
to be there,” Navarro said.
While P&A
doesn’t keep tabs on the competition, Navarro admitted
that he hears complaints about rivals.
“We want
to make sure that we don’t get the same complaints and if
we do, we want to address them right away,” Navarro said.
“A client will never call you if he doesn’t need you. The
reason he calls you is because he needs you and he needs
you now.”
This
preoccupation with efficiency and excellence has resulted
in the creation of a sister unit, a specialty law firm
that allows customers to file formal proceedings
immediately, if they so require.
“To a very
large extent, the battleground in our tax business is
responsiveness, the ability to deliver promptly what we
promised to deliver, which exactly is one of our
philosophies,” said Benjamin R. Punongbayan, chairman and
one of P&A’s founding partners.
To ensure
that these promises are never broken, the company has,
among others, established a formal mechanism designed to
improve employee relationships, be it between supervisors
and subordinates or secretaries and janitors.
Since
unresolved tensions between coworkers inevitably result in
low morale and poor performance, P&A management thought it
best to hold a yearly general meeting in which all sorts
of questions—professional and personal—are aired and given
due attention.
“Although
personal issues sometimes come out during these meetings,
some of the people who are new to the firm or have come
from other companies are amazed that these things could
even be discussed,” Navarro said, adding that subjects run
the gamut of employee concerns from audit questions to
more internal matters.
For his
part, Punongbayan said that employees are even permitted
to write their questions down during these meetings.
“We make
sure that all things are answered, even if questions
require a study,” said Punongbayan.
Moreover,
if an employee is shy or unable
and/or unwilling to raise a sensitive matter during the
meeting, s/he can always log on to the P&A Ethics hot line
(ethics.pna.ph,
a link to which is available on the company’s home page)
and file an anonymous report.
Available
to its personnel, suppliers and customers, the
confidential online third-party tool allows an independent
entity to “address issues such as fraud, abuse and
misconduct in the workplace...strengthen ethical policies,
and minimize exposure due to fraud and abuse.”
Upon
receiving the report, an external advisor previously
authorized by P&A will investigate the incident and is
expected to document his findings within seven days.
Although
its antifraud initiatives are neither unique nor original,
P&A’s ethics hot line is just one of a whole set of
mechanisms to ensure that it complies with international
standards, accounting or otherwise.
Post-Enron
IN 2005
Filipino financial regulators, hoping to prevent a fallout
similar to the one spawned by Enron, instituted rules
patterned after the International Financial Reporting
Standards (IFRS). Currently being used in Europe and very
recently adopted by the US Securities and Exchange
Commission, the IFRS is a set of principles-based
accounting practices that have slowly gained worldwide
acceptance.
Expected
to assist managers and owners in practicing good corporate
governance, the new standards are nevertheless predicated
on strict rules that make it more difficult for companies
to mislead shareholders regarding their true financial
conditions.
As a
result, the
Philippines’
accounting industry—and by extension, the corporate
sector—was daunted by the paradigmatic shift in the
adoption of the new rules three years ago.
During
this period, P&A took the lead in helping customers and
even the competition understand what the whole thing was
all about.
P&A,
intending to be at the forefront of thought leadership in
the industry, issued publications that dealt with the
implications of the new standards, the only accounting
firm ever to do so at that time, according to Navarro.
“That was
part of our advocacy to raise everyone’s standards,”
Navarro said, adding that one of its books—“Taxation of
Financial Institutions in the Philippines”—is now being
used by the Court of Tax Appeals and the Bureau of
Internal Revenue.
P&A has
also reached out to smaller accounting firms and to the
country’s 110,000 CPAs, most of whom are not
SEC-accredited, by inviting them to participate in the
company’s training programs.
In
January, a month before it celebrated its 20th year, the
P&A Foundation and the Financial Executives Institute of
the Philippines launched another book, “The Power to
Govern.”
Given to
all business schools for free, the book includes the
corporate governance principles of the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 30
countries which believe in the free-market system, and
local case studies of companies involved in good and bad
business practices.
“For a
long time, there has been a dearth of real leadership in
the profession. No one has been telling business that
complying with new standards is the right thing to do,”
Navarro said. “We are challenged to fulfill that role.”
Despite
P&A’s efforts, Navarro, in a separate BusinessMirror
report, said that many big Filipino companies have yet to
comply with new reporting standards. The same report
quoted SEC Chairman Fe Barin, who said that “less than 80
percent” of the more than 200 firms in the Philippine
Stock Exchange are complying with stricter accounting
rules.
But these
setbacks have not deterred P&A from continuing its
advocacy for good governance. Neither has it weakened its
resolve to maintain its integrity and independence.
As a
result, the accounting firm’s reputation has preceded and
has spoken for itself.
Case in
point: before a Japanese mobile-phone operator decided to
invest in PLDT, the company hired P&A to undertake an
independent and objective assessment of the local
telecommunications company. P&A has also been selected to
undertake due diligence work for many of the Philippines’
biggest privatization projects, including the National
Power Corp., Petron, Philippine Airlines, among others.
This has
shown that the efforts of P&A to stick to new accounting
standards have not been in vain.
“Early
this year, we made a declaration that we will do what is
right even if the others are doing something that is
merely acceptable,” Punongbayan said. “If we believe that
our own interpretation of things is more difficult than
the others or at a higher level, we will pick the higher
level. We may lose business in the short term but our
compliance with standards will make us No. 1 eventually.”
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