Doug Niven, Senior Executive Leader at ASIC provides insights into ASIC’s focus areas for companies with December 2018 period-ends, and also discusses some findings from ASIC’s most recent financial reporting surveillance program.

In this weeks’ podcast episode, we are joined by Danette Fenton-Menzies, Director of Learning at Magical Learning. She will discuss topics such as what is strategic leadership, how does strategic finance support strategic leadership, what skills do we need to develop and to value add from a strategic perspective and what tools do we need to support strategic finance and the future of developing it.

The ATO have been making record referrals of SMSF auditors to ASIC, which they expect will continue to rise. In this podcast Kellie Grant, Director of the SMSF Approved Auditors Portfolio at the ATO, explains to Claire Grayston, CPA Australia’s policy adviser on audit and assurance, what the ATO are looking for in their reviews of SMSF auditors and shares the two new programs they are pursuing in 2018/19. Kellie sets out how the ATO are selecting auditors for review, what their expectations are of a compliant audit file, as well as the actions they take where breaches of the independence requirements or auditing standards are found. Kellie highlights what can be learnt from the latest case law and how the ATO can help SMSF auditors, including in identifying SMSF auditor number (SAN) misuse.

In this month’s Excel topic podcast episode, Neale Blackwood CPA will discuss Power Query and why accountants should be using it. Neale will cover topics that all Excel users should know relating to Power Query such as mapping tables, unpivot, merging, appending and budgeting.