Assistant Manager - Matt Sevenoaks

Well, it turns out that accounting isn’t that boring after all. Although those considering audit might want to take a careful look at what’s involved.

Accountancy was cited by almost everyone as a brilliant place to get a solid understanding of business and many people exploit the training as a springboard into other careers both within finance and more broadly (such as management consultancy). This makes it a pretty good option for those who aren’t entirely sure which direction to take but who want a solid qualification from which to build.

The exact qualification you sign-up to will depend on what interests you and what slant you want your training to have. Typically at the big 4 you’ll be going for the ACA, which probably has the edge in terms of prestige. If you’re interested in being an accountant within a business then you’ll be heading in the direction of CIMA. Public service has its own specialised training and that’s CIPFA.

Something that may seem a little counter intuitive is that you don’t actually have to be a math geek to be successful in this industry. Whilst it might help for more specialized areas such as tax and actuarial work, most people we spoke to didn’t have a clue what the whole top row of a calculator does!

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Matt Sevenoaks and I work in the forensic department at KPMG.

What is Accountancy?

Accountancy is the practice of being able to determine the financial performance of an organisation and its current worth.

What attracted you to this career?

I think it is because I wanted to gain a professional qualification because I think like many people my age I still didn’t know, there is no such thing as a job for life anymore and as a result I knew that my career path was going to be quite varied for the next 40-50 years and I wanted that variety.  Because I didn’t know any specific thing that I wanted to dedicate my career to at the time, I thought it would be great to get a job whereby I could get a professional qualification which would actually open up more doors to me.  Because I trained for the Chartered Accountancy qualification at KPMG when I was in the audit practice because I knew that would mean that I could go and work in corporate finance, or work in transaction services or forensic where I have ended up or if I wanted to I could perhaps then go on to working in industry so work for an investment bank or for an oil or gas company.  Also because I knew that that particular qualification, the ATA, which makes you a Chartered Accountant, is also international recognised and I knew that having gone travelling during my gap year that I may actually want to work abroad one day and because that is an internationally recognised qualification, it might make gaining a job abroad a lot easier.  So that is the reason I chose to do accounting as a qualification. 

I joined KPMG about five years ago, I joined having graduated from Bristol University and I joined the financial services audit department and then after about two and a half years of working there, I decided I wanted to get a taste of working in a different area at KPMG.  So having spoken to a couple of colleagues in other areas, I looked into forensic and I could see it was the sort of area you can add value to the client and you are working alongside the client quite regularly and that was something I wanted in my career as I progressed so I did a secondment there for six months and absolutely loved that area so made it permanent about two years ago.

What does your job involve?

At the moment, it is quite varied in my role in forensic but to break it down, I get involved with investigation, so that can be whereby the client contacts us saying they suspect there has been a fraud within their business or they might contact us saying they believe they might actually have broken some regulatory rules and they want us to go in and do an investigation and form an opinion as to whether that has occurred and then produce a factual report stating exactly what we believe has occurred based on the evidence we do claim.  For example I have been involved in a case where I had to go and do an on sight client raid whereby the client suspected a fraud so we went to lots of different locations across the UK and then conducted on sight searches for particular pieces of information and documentation which we suspected might allude to a fraud having taken place. On that investigation we also got involved in the review of emails so we would image people's laptops and then we would actually run those emails across a list of search words and then only search those emails which hit the search words that were on the list that were linked to this allegation of fraud and then try and collate relevant evidence which supported whether it had or had not occurred so that is the sort of things we do in terms of investigations that I have been involved in but I also do fraud awareness training, whereby we go to a client when they want to improve their employees’ awareness of fraud, so what is fraud, how can it occur within their particular industry.  Then highlight whether the staff within that client are aware of how they would report a fraud, or if they knew it was going on within their business.  So using the information and the knowledge I have been given from investigations, I can then share war stories with their employees whilst training them about fraud and hopefully improving awareness within that organisation.  In terms of my role within KPMG, not only do I work in forensic but I also get involved in marketing to clients whereby I and another colleague will target a specific law firm and advertise the forensic services which we offer and we feel we could help that law firm to improve their business and provide all the services which they try to provide whilst working alongside them, so I get all of that.  I also help out with graduate recruitment as and when I can.

What do you do on a typical day?

To kind of give you an idea, something whereby time management is incredibly key and my skills in that area have definitely had to improve in the past five years as I have taken on more rolls within the firm. So for example graduate recruitment is sometimes done in our Canary Wharf office whereas the projects I get involve in in forensic can be based in the client site somewhere in London.  So it is a case of managing peoples expectations on the project as to when I will be available.  Then travelling from that site to Canary Wharf whereby I will probably be doing these interviews for graduate recruitment or doing assessment days for graduate recruitment.  Then also the marketing role that I achieve is normally done in the evenings whereby we will do drinks with the law firm or we will meet up with them in a pub to discuss their work to see if we can help them out at all so that is an evening commitment which could be based anywhere in London, hopefully in a nice bar.  You are very much moving around quite a lot and then there is travel abroad which you might need to fit in, for example I do the fraud awareness training and hopefully, I think it is two weeks time, I am going to be going out to a client that has offices in New York and we will be flying out and doing some training sessions with them for a couple of days.  Then I have some internal training within KPMG because KPMG is quite keen on developing the skills of its employees so it has a lot of internal training sessions.  So I have got to come back quite quickly so I can attend that session which is going to be in our Reading office.  So it is a lot of moving about and there is a lot of time management so I have learnt to master Microsoft Outlook so I can use my calendar.

What different roles are there in Forensic Accounting?

There are seven different service lines and I will try and remember the ones I have had experience.  There is the forensic technology element, which I haven't had any experience in myself but they work alongside us in investigations, so they are the technology guys that will help with our investigations.  Also they are the people, when we are doing an on site raid they will get an employees laptop and they will actually mirror everything that is on there. So for example you could go in at night and mirror somebody’s laptop and leave it there and they would never know that somebody had actually been on there but you will actually have that replica of it and then the forensic technology team will take that copy and they will put it into a search tool so a piece of software, we use lots of different types, and that technology will then enable us to run key search terms.  So fraud or manipulating sales and will then show all the emails that will hit on those words and then they will then coach us on how we can use that.  I will be the person who actually looks at those emails and reviews whether they are relevant based on what the technology has achieved, so forensic technology get involved in that sort of work but they also do data analytics, so for example, two years ago we had a client who wanted to look at the journal entry to which are posted in their accounts to what we did was we took the millions of journal entries which they posted annually because they are a missive company and then we could do some funky analysis of that and pick out a small sample of journals which were the most unusual.  So by using this technology that forensics have we could then say to the audit teams these of the millions that you have given us are the more interesting because we don’t quite expect them to be there.  So for example they could have been picked because they were posted on a weekend or they were entered at midnight or the reason that was entered in the journal entry description was very vague or like correcting error or that sort of thing, so the ones that can lead to those journals being selected by the technology that we use.

So that is just a brief example of the things that forensic technology do.

Economic crime is a division which would help with things like VAT fraud, I wont go into that but it is basically helping people like HMRC with their investigations and following the movement of the money when VAT fraud has taken place.  So they can then trace where the money has gone so if the person who committed the VAT fraud is then captured and arrested and then found guilty of committing that fraud, we can help them trace the movement of that money and any assets they may have bought as a result of getting that money and reclaiming that back so that Revenue and Customers can effectively regain that cash they have lost. 

There is your fraud investigation side where we do client raids and conduct interviews under caution sometimes, for example we will interview an employee and say you are been accused of this, here are the facts, there are the emails, here are the documents, what have you got to say about that. 

There is also the expert witness side, that can deal with disputes so when you have company A and Company B and the get together for a joint venture and Company B was convincing company A, saying “this is going to be a really good opportunity for us, we are going to make around 2 million pounds with this joint venture”.  Then it all goes horribly wrong the joint venture makes lots of loss and then Company A will then try and sue Company B and say “we have lost all this money and you made all these promises and it didn’t work out” and then Company A will then dispute that and say, you are lying.  So we will try and quantify that loss and see if it is relevant and we can act for different parties so sometimes we can acting for company A, who are trying to boost the size of the claim and other times it will be Company B who are trying to reduce the size of the claim.

There are lots of other areas, sometimes we might be representing the wife or the husband in a high profile divorced case, where the wife might say, “my husband's business is worth 10 million pounds and I want 50% of it” and the husband will say “oh no it is only worth half a million”, again we can help with the valuation of the business for either party.

Also as an expert witness we can work on qualifying the loss of profits claim, so I worked on an investigation where client had a major flood and it brought a lot of their products offline and as a result they were unable to sell their products for about six months but they had business interruption insurance with an insurance company so we helped them quantify how much money they thought they had lost as a result of this occurring and then helped them submit that claim and we were the independent expert that said whether the number they had come up with was reliable and based on reasonable assumptions.  So that is the sort of thing they did in that area.

Interviewer: So it sounds sort of law like in a way do you have to keep on top of financial law?

Well we work along side lawyers in those cases so they deal with the legal aspect so the words and then we will deal with the numbers side and so in fraud investigations we will work alongside the lawyers and sometimes they will decide to lead the investigation and they will be the ones conducting the interviews and we will focus more on the email review, the document review and then present them with the refined evidence.  We do all that work for them and present the relevant documents and emails which they may want to use in the interview and then there may be expert witness work where they may be a dispute with a married couple getting a divorce, there will be lawyers on either side of that and we will be working along side them in terms of quantifying the numbers side of the work involved.

What are the best bits about your job?

I think it is the variety, I'm the sort of person that gets board doing the same thing and that is the reason why I joined KPMG when I was doing the research, I wanted a role that would provide that variety, where I would get the chance to work with different people in organisations of different sizes and in different industries.  I have definitely got that, especially in forensic. Because when I was in audit I learned a lot about the financial services industry because I focused on that one.  But forensic is one whereby clients will approach you, so I did a year secondment to an oil and gas company I presented some of my fraud awareness training sessions to some media clients as well as some financial services clients and then I have also worked on investigations where clients, we call it consumer industrial markets but it is basically a construction company, I have worked on an investigation in that area.  So the variety on offer is what has made it interesting for me and that coupled with the other things I do, such as graduate recruitment and the marketing means that my day is always different and that is what I need in order to keep my interest and keep me busy.

What are the speicialisms within your industry?

KPMG, if you imagine it as a giant organisation, which it is, because there are about 11,000 of us in the UK alone, is broken down into three main sections, so you have got audit, tax and advisory.  In term of tax that will be broken down into sectors, so you have kind of got infrastructure, government, health, which will deal with NHS and other governing bodies and universities.  You have got the financial services division, which is the banks, insurance companies, you have got ICE which is Information, Communication and Entertainment, where we have got clients such as BBC, ITV, EMI, Vodaphone, also clients like IBM, Accenture.  Then we have got CIM, which is consumer industrial markets, so anything that makes something or has a factory, we will fit into that.  Then you have tax which is broken down into private clients, whereby you might be helping high worth individuals such as pop stars, or multi millionaires or successful businessmen where you give them tax advice and how they can minimise their tax liability. You have also got corporate tax where you will be working with small medium and large size firms and how they can minimise their tax bills.  Then there is advisory which splits off into loads of different areas, but you have got things like IT advisory, so how can a client of ours improve its IT systems, you have got forensic, you have got corporate finance, which helps put together deals with companies in mergers and acquisitions.  You have got transaction services, so when a company is considering actually making a offer on a company they will perform what is called due diligence on it.  So if I'm going to buy a company for a £100m, after I have made that offer, I am going to go into that company and have them provide me with information so transaction services can perform due diligence on that and actually see whether that offer of £100m is accurate.  There is pensions advisory, people services element and then there is also the infrastructure element so things like graduate recruitment in KPMG.

What are the worst bits about your job?

I think with that as you get more senior and you have these commitment and it is all about managing the expectations with the different groups you work with, one of things I liked about KPMG is you always get support from the people you are working with in terms of your development but one of the things I have round in KPMG is everyone is struggling to do the best they can and deliver 100% but obviously if you have got different commitments you often feel I can't offer 100% on that area because I have got to off to this marketing event now and sometimes you do feel a bit guilty.  But as long as you are managing people expectations and say, “oh I've got to go here because I am doing this now” and just making sure you give people the appropriate warning because if they do need resources in terms of other people and you are not going to be that person, as long as you give them enough notice so they can find someone else when you are not around, that is not normally an issue but it is making sure you keep on top of that so you can make sure you do all of those things.

What has been your greatest achievement?

I think one of the things I wanted to do was I attended a course, it was called an insight into management course at Bristol University when I was a student there and it is what got me initially interested in accounting. Because if is a four day course, where you do lots of business games with lots of different employers and also representatives within those firms will lead the teams of students in the various exercises.  So it gives you great chance to get the business games, to get an understanding of what to do there and also an opportunity to speak to people from those organisations and from that I managed to speak to someone who was doing the chartered accountancy qualification and really enjoyed it and so I though maybe I would go in that direction.  So when I actually went on that direction I thought hang on I am still at Bristol, it would be great if I could represent KPMG at these events so I contacted Bristol and said can I come back next year and get involved as s team leader representing KPMG and went there, did that and got some positive feedback from some of the students that they found it useful to get an insight from me about KPMG and what it is like to work there.  I also found the following year, I went back an asked if could we present a KPMG business game there because I wanted to expand our involvement in the four day course, so I went on and challenged myself to present a business game to about 120 students, because I had not done much presentation within my role in audit and I wanted to do that as an extra challenge and so we did that and then for the past two years we have now been invited back three times from Bristol to come and present the same business game and it has been really good because I have been on induction days within KPMG  for new joiners and I have had people come up to me and say “I was there at the course you presented and it was you that made me think of applying for KPMG and I am now here”.  So that is quite rewarding to know you have made that difference.  Then this year, because I have moved from our Bristol offices to London, it was suggested by Bristol University that we expand KPMG's involvement in these events in other universities and so back in April this year I contacted UCL and said could I get involved in presenting this game here and we did that this year so it was quite rewarding to actually be able to do that and teach other students about KPMG.

Any regrets?

I think the most important thing by far is to go out and meet people from these organisations so if you can go to a careers day at the employer that you are interested in then go and meet the people that are there because you will get a good impression of what is going to be like in those organisations.  I went to lots of careers fairs at university and quickly got an impression of whether I was going to like those people and the careers services that you have at university are very good so when I was at Bristol they said yes there is one on interviewing so you can develop your skills there and sometimes they can be run by the people you are going to be applying to and that gave me another opportunity to meet people at KPMG at the time and by actually going to the different events actually meeting people form KPMG, I got an impression  they were the sort of people I would like to work for quite easily, so I would recommend people certainly do that and really try and treat your interview process as an interview for the employer as much as them interviewing you, it is easy to say that now that I have gone through that hurdle but at the time, I did try and think ok I am stressed about the interview today but I am going to try and get a feel of what it is like when I walking in this office and being interviewed by that person and see if I get a good vibe off them so to see if I would actually like working in this organisation so that is the advice I would give.

What is the pay like and are there any perks?

The pay is very competitive, the reasons why I chose the ACA qualification is because you actually get remunerated very well.  The benefits package at KPMG is very good as well so not only is your base salary very good but you get perks like five weeks standard holiday, but you also get the option to buy or sell a week, so if you don't like holidays you can actually sell a week or if you do like your holidays like me, you can actually buy an extra week a year, which I find very rewarding.  There are lots of other benefits which can be found on their website.

How long is a working day and do you have to work out of hours?

It is actually quite reasonable, I do work longer than the 9 to 5, I do come in around 9 and I can sometimes work until 7-7.30 but that is because I have chosen to take on additional roles within KPMG, I have mentioned the marketing and I have mentioned the graduate recruitment and by having to be around different places at different times is what naturally adds to me having to do a few extra hours but you can work 9 to 6 in forensic for a sustained time, but it all depends on the engagement you are on, if you are on a job that is only going to last for two weeks and there is a tight deadline and there is only five members of staff yet there is a lot to get through, you could be working longer hours and you do have to work late into the night but it is always recognised by your senior members of staff so you do actually get the gratification and appreciation for the effort you have put in.  I don't mind doing it when I have to but weekend work, I would say I have probably done it once or twice in Forensic over the last two years, so again it depends on the engagement there are some that you have to do that occasionally and there others you could be on for a year on it and you would never have to do that.

Is there much in the way of travel?

I also get involved with internal training in forensics so for people joining forensic, there is an international forensic one course, they call it, where all the people from the European practices will collate in one area and will be introduced to what forensic is all about and so I went to present that a couple of weeks ago and that was in Budapest, that was quite nice.  The fraud awareness training that I do can be based in London, I have done sessions here, it all depends on the location of the client.  So for example I have got one I am going to in New York and another colleague who is going on to California for the same client to deliver a separate presentation, so pretty much wherever the engagement is you will go, so although I have spent a lot of time in London for the last two years since I have been based in the London office, I could have just as easily have been based in Switzerland or Iran, so it can be very varied.

Do you have to be based anywhere in particular?

We have our forensic practices based in about ten offices in the UK so it is possible to do work there however, the nature of the work may differ, so a lot of our big ticket jobs are based in London because that is where a lot of our clients are so the sort of the work you might expect to do in the regions would be smaller scales frauds or investigations or we have an area that is known as an expert witness, whereby there may be a dispute between two companies entered into a joint venture and one of them is pursuing the other for loss of earnings as a result of the venture not working and so it will be the job of forensics to see if that claim value was actually accurate and backed up by correct assumptions.  The work will differ depending on which region you are working in but there is definitely forensic accounting work available in the regions because that is where I was when I first six months of my time in forensic, I was based in Bristol office and Reading office.

What is the working environment like?

In forensic, the attire in the office is pretty much business casual so you can get away without wearing a tie, however, if you are out at a client site you will match what the client is wear, if they dress down you dress down, there is not point in wearing a suit if the client is wearing jeans because you would just look a bit odd and stand out so yes we tend to match our clients when we are out at site.  In terms of the demographics in forensics I think it is about 50/50, from what I have been told.

How did you get into your job?

As I said before I got my degree from Bristol university and was in economics and mathematics and was a 2:1 however in terms of the job specification for joining audit and the accountancy route within KPMG, from my understanding of it, is a 2:1 or higher in any degree discipline and from any university as far as KPMG is concerned.  There are other requirements in terms of A level results and I think you have got to get quite good grades in GCSE maths and English, but provided you have got those, they don't discriminate as to which degree type you have got or which university you have come from. Because I think those qualifications and gradings such as a 2:1 to show you have got the ability to go through the chartered accountancy training group and be successful in getting that qualification so for example in my year group when I joined KPMG audit, there were people who had done chemistry degree, psychology degrees, English, geography as well as maths and there was a few accounting degrees there as well. But there wasn't any discrimination or bias to the particular degree type.

Interviewer: Is it possible to go straight into forensics or do most people join audit and come through audit to forensic?

 Forensic is expanding quite massively at the moment, we are the fasted growing area of KPMG and have been for three years and as a result the opportunity to join as a graduate is there now, however at the moment I think it is two places every year, so if you relate that to audit where it is probably several hundred places a year it is quite different. So the opportunity is there but in terms of how we normally source staff we normally get them coming from the audit just having passed the training route so they have done three years and got their chartered accountant qualification.  We are quite a unique department in that we source out people from very different areas, so we have people who used to work for he serious fraud office, who used to work for financial services authority, ex police force as well as people who have come from the audit practice in KPMG or externally from other firms so it is a varied mix and we do get some people who just join us on a one year programme straight out of university to see what it is like and then after a year if they want to they can then say oh I would be interested in doing the ACA, which is the chartered accountancy qualification or doing some other accounting qualification so there are a lot of options within forensic.

What's the application process like?

For KPMG you have got to do an online application form whereby you fill in your qualifications, your GCSE's your A levels, a personal statement about why you want to work for KPMG.  Then you do an online numeracy test which you are invited to do if you are successful, there is also an online verbal reasoning test you do now, back in my day I had to sit and do it at a desk.  But the whole procedure on that space is very quick in that you get a response in 24 hours after you have submitted your first application form it is a similar turnaround for the numeracy and verbal reasoning test.  If you are successful with those, you will be invited to a first round interview and if you are successful with that you are invited for the final assessment day which is a day whereby you will do an in-tray exercise where you sit down with a laptop and you are given a series of emails questions with responses that you can reply to and then you will also be asked to reply to and then you will also be asked to draft two emails yourself in relation to a client request, which get assessed by someone at KPMG and you will also do a group exercise element that lasts about 20 minutes where you will work with up to four or six other graduates and you will be assessed on things like business focus and the ability to work within a team, communication that sort of thing. Then also on that day you will also do a partner interview whereby you will also do a presentation on a business of your choice to the partner and then answer a few queries to the partner as to why you have chosen that company and what challenges you think they face, that is pretty much the rough thing and then you will get a response in a few days as to whether you have been successful or not and whether you will receive an offer or not.

What are the key skills required for your job?

You have definitely got to have an eye for detail because sometimes you might be doing something very specific like a client raid and you are looking through an entire office and you will obviously need to have a specification of what you are looking for but then you need to be able to find it, you also then need to be able to make quick decisions, because if you are in a room which has got 30 boxes in and you have a day to get it done, you are having to be quite brutal about it, is this box going to contain the stuff I am looking for, no, so move on or you could be there looking for days before you get the job done.  I would also say the ability to work with people and adapt to every situation because you work with lots of different teams, the same situation works in audit, you can work within different areas throughout the year so the ability to build effective working relationships quickly and also have a laugh with people because if you are working away from home for a couple of weeks or couple of months on end, you are going to need to get on with these people and have a good time inside work as well as in the evening when you are actually living in the same area together, so that is quite key.  I also think drive and resilience as well because there could be times when you have a tight deadline and you have to work late hours and obviously if you are feeling down about that or worn out and you kind of demonstrate that to your colleagues it can have an impact on morale, so the ability to see the positive in people if you are feeling a bit tired is really key if you are going to help maintain morale and actually have a good time on those engagements where it might get a bit time pressured at times but there are others where everyone is relaxed and having a good time, so it can vary.

What's your top tip for breaking into your industry?

You have to have done a lot of research so for example for the audit qualification, when I was researching it I made sure I went to careers days and spoke to people and asked them what is was like working for this company, what are the hours like, what are the benefits like, what sort of clients would I be working on, what would be my day to day duties?  If you can try and get work experience great but if not it doesn’t matter it just adds to the experience is you can.  Going along and looking on line as well and researching the website.  You do get a lot of people that come along for interviews and they are asked so why KPMG and the answer they give you quite clearly shows they don't know what differentiates it from its competitors and there is quite a lot there.  If you look on the website and you do speak to people you can really find things that differentiate KPMG from its competitors and by doing that research it can make you more passionate when you are actually at those interviews and can give you more conviction because you actually are really interested in the person you are standing in front of.  Because I had done so much research and when I got through to the interview stage I knew I wanted to work for KPMG because there were so many areas of the company that appealed to me and I wanted to communicate that in the interview, I think it came across why I wanted to work for them as a firm.

Interviewer: So what does make KPMG different?

I think the people, I have worked with so many people over the past five years and you pretty much get on with everybody within half an hour of meeting them and then if you are interested in learning something from somebody they are more than happy to share their knowledge with you.  There have been occasions when I have had to do a piece of work and I have said I'm sorry I don't have a clue where to start with this because I haven't got any experience with this particular area and people are more than happy to sit along side you and coach you and teach you exactly how to do that job and do it well and that is something that definitely appealed. Also because they have been such nice people, when I have been on away jobs it has been really easy to have a good time go out with them, go for a meal, have a couple of drinks and have a laugh and that has helped with the tough times that you mixing working a full day with then studying in the evening, it is nice to know when you are on away jobs and you might have to study in the evening that when you do go out for a meal, you can have a laugh with the people you are with.

What's the career progress and how quickly can you move up the career ladder?

Within forensics when you join, it is not straightforward, but the main roles you can join as an assistant so you will be helping photocopying and document control, for example if you are in an investigation and they need to monitor the movements of all the evidence collated so if it is verifying reviewed by a particular member of staff logging it out of the filing system we have and then logging it back in and then also logging away any working files which we might have created as part of the investigation, that is the sort of thing an assistant may get involved with.  As you progress through the forensic, you might get some form of qualification for example you might become a chartered accountant you can then move up to the role of assistant manager whereby you might be leading small teams and guiding those assistants and actually teaching them what to do and what work needs to be done and allocating work out.  The move from assistant to assistant manager can be about three years but it can be slightly longer.  Then there is the move from assistant manager to manager which will take two to three years; manager to senior manager, again about three years; senior manager to director, again about three years and then they have just introduced associate partner which is the step between director and partner and partner is pretty much the highest you can get, it's the dream. 

The thing I liked about forensic is that the structure is quite flat, I have worked on an engagement where I had a director on that job and at the time I was at assistant level and he said “oh we are having a meeting with the directors of the company and I would like you to attend”.  We would sit there around a table and would discuss the issue we were investigating and they would actually ask for my opinion as well as the directors, so it wasn’t very hierarchical in the sense that I just kind of get on with the filing, they appreciated that because I had been on the engagement for several months, that I may have some valid input so it was good to actually have that.  So as you become more senior within forensic, it is more about management and people management making sure the expectations of the client are being delivered and then also making sure that everybody within that project is actually being developed correctly, so if somebody works in fraud investigations but actually wants to get a bit of expert witness experience or work on a bit of crime areas, these are all different areas within forensic and it is to make sure that your staff who are working beneath you are happy and are developing their skills and are then going to be able to progress throughout the firm as we grow, so all about talent management and project management and making sure the clients are happy as well as your staff.

Where do you see the industry going?

I think forensic has been exploding in terms of size and when talking to friends who work in other forensic departments within KPMG or other top four competitors, they are experiencing massive growth as well. I think that is definitely going to continue over the next few years because you tend to find that forensics is counter cyclical so when the economy is going down then we get busier and my view on that is when your results in your business start going down it is all about really focusing on the numbers and be thinking where can we actually be saving money and when you have actually got that microscope over things its when things like fraud getting uncovered.  I think as the credit crunch really starts to impact on the economy the next couple of years, more and more breaches are going to be uncovered as people try to cut corners and don’t necessarily do it the right way and that is then going to need us to assist more and more and then also you find that companies when they are struggling or say bought a company a year ago being told it was worth half a billion and then as the credit crunch hits that company is not making any cash anymore.  You may find there might be litigation involved whereby this company finds it might not be worth as much at they thought it was at the time and that can lead to a legal dispute and that will obviously involve the quantification of how much it is worth and so that is where our expert witness department may get involved so there is a large scope for work and growth in the next few years and that is definitely something we have got in our agenda and our strategy for the next few years is to grow to a substantial practice, only in the UK but also in Europe because we have also become KPMG Europe, we have merged with our German and Swiss practices so the combined target for income in a few years is something in the region of about £2m euros is what we are aiming to get.

Is there scope for movement during or after this career?

You can if you want to, I have made the decision personally that I am happy within KPMG but when I do qualify and I do sit down and question what do I want in the next step, what variety do I want, what industries do I want to work in, who do I want to work with, team sizes, do I want to work in fraud?  So based on all those assessments I made, I decided KPMG was the place I wanted to stay, but in terms of opportunities once you have qualified, they are huge, so pretty much as soon as you qualify you start getting pulls from head hunters saying that “oh I see from the examination passed list you are on it, congratulations, can I interest you in talking about opportunities?”  You get that a lot, so the opportunities are definitely there and if you want to go and work abroad, as I said earlier, the qualification is internationally recognised so you can do secondments abroad if you want to or go and get a job independently on you own and go and work abroad quite easily.  I personally am looking to get a secondment over in our practice in America, hopefully next year so that is something I am pursuing, so yes there is definitely a lot of opportunities there once you have qualified.

What are the industry resources that someone interested in joining must know about?

From a business point of view I pretty much focus on the BBC, it is good for giving you a quick snapshot of what is going on across industries and across businesses and then I occasionally read the Financial Times if I want to get a bit of analysis and then also I go along to various websites, I won’t name names but one being the BBC but I like to invest in emerging economies and I have actually found that certain investment websites you can go on help you analyse the trends within those economies and you can actually decide which companies are doing really well in those countries and which are expanding and that actually improves my understanding of what is happening on a global perspective of what is happening.  So I will go on those every week or so to get an understanding of what is happening in the global economy as opposed to just the London area.

If you weren't in this career, what would you be doing?

People always say I should have been a BBC children’s presenter and normally over enthusiastic about things, so that or be in a boy band, I was voted the one most likely to be in a boy band at school but I can't sing so it was never going to happen.