The Institute of Legal Accountants of Ireland

Wellfield House, Blessington Road, Naas, Co. Kildare. 087 9562799 .

CONFERENCE 2008 INFORMATION

The Institute's 2008 Conference was held at the Clarion Hotel in Cork on the 12/13th September 2008. The Conference was opened by the Minister of Foreign affairs Micheál Martin , TD. We are grateful to him

Further details are in the conference brocuhure here (You need Adobe Reader to view these. You can download it free of charge by clicking here.)

The conference was well attended with an increased number of day delegates probably an indication of the increased need for CPD points and hours by Solicitors and Accountants.

One member commented subsequently The Presenters gave us informative presentations delivered in a lively and interesting manner. This together with the opportunity to meet with the exhibitors and fellow delegates made for a very beneficial few days training.  The benefits to us will, I believe, only become truly visible when we return to our offices and implement some of the information and recommendations presented to us.

Another said Just thought I would drop you a line to say how much I enjoyed the conference on Friday. I found the programme to be most interesting and relevant.

There are some photos taken at conference here.

Paul O'Connell -Institute Chairman- reviewed the conference as follows

The Institute held its 22nd Annual Conference on 12th and 13th of September at the Clarion Hotel Cork. In total on Friday we had 65 delegates which was quite a strong attendance.

The committee put together a strong, interesting and varied programme for the conference.

I review below some of the speakers and topics.

The conference was officially opened by Minister for Foreign Affairs Mr. Micheál Martin. The minister spoke in glowing terms of the Institute. We are very grateful to the Minster for taking time from his busy schedule to attend and open our conference. 

Steve MacFeely of the Central Statistics spoke of the need for statistics and how the data gained from the various forms that practices complete are used in determiningg decisions made by Government agencies. Steve also outlined CSO policies in trying to reduce the burden on Practices which was well received by Ger McNamara.

Our second speaker was Denis O’Rourke from Cork Revenue. Denis outlined Revenues new software REAP which stands for “Risk Evaluation, Analysis and Profiling”. This software has been used in the past twelve months by Revenue to collect and collate the expert knowledge of Revenue Officers. This knowledge is turned into rules, it integrates data using these rules and when the rules fire it provides profile of cases ranked in order of their risk to Revenue.

Denis also made delegates aware of Revenue’s Technical Advisory service (RTS) which is free to avail of if you wish to get clarification on the treatment of various technical situations from a tax perspective.

The link to the RTS is  http://www.revenue.ie/services/rts_guidelines.doc

Angela MacDonald presented on E – Stamping which Revenue intend launching in May 2009.

Over lunch, member’s guests and exhibitors chatted about various aspects of the topic and other matters of mutual interest.

The afternoon commenced with Billy O’Riordan of Pricewaterhousecoopers. Billy spoke to us on Practice Management issues for Law Firms. This was a very interesting presentation from Billy in which he outlined what Practices should be doing in order to maximise fees and profits.

Our next speaker was Kieran Finnan of Finnan Financial on “Banking – Adding to your bottom line”. The first part of Kieran’s presentation was to outline the various clearing procedures for the major banks in Ireland along with their respective fees and charges.
The second part of Kieran presentation was advice on how to reduce your bank charges while as the same time increasing money earned by practices from deposit interest.

Our final speaker for the day was Brett Warburton-Smith of Lockton. Brett kindly travelled from London and gave an interesting presentation on Risk Management and Mortgage Fraud in the Legal Profession. Brett outlined the various tell tale signs of recognising fraudulent clients.

All sessions on the day led to interesting bouts of questions and answers.  Old friendships were renewed by those who went to the Bar and all reassembled later in the evening in the main restaurant of the hotel where with were served with an excellent meal and some fine wines.

The following morning saw an eleven o’clock start with a presentation by Mick O’Regan on “Business Continuity Management”. The first part of Mick’s presentation had delegates on the edge of their seats as Mick played a six minute DVD which highlighted a number of disasters that had occurred in the last few months from floods to fires etc.  Mike’s presentation was very interesting and informative and lead to some interesting discussions on how delegates were storing they back up mediums. This subject is something we will comeback to again in the next twelve months.

Before lunch we held a members meeting which various members thanked the committee for organising the conference.

I would also like to thank my fellow committee members Alice Leddy, Mike O’Reilly, Sean Kelly and Una Mulcaire for all their work in organising this event over the last nine months

I would also like to thank our exhibitors for their continued support and welcome exhibitors who are here for the first time this year. 

The Speakers were as follows:

(You will need a reader if you do not have Microsoft Powerpoint . You can dowload one here.)

The exhibitors were as follows:

All sessions were suitable for CPD hours for the Law Society and the Accounting Institutes. The CPD certificates will be sent out after the conference to those who did not obtain them on the day..

Membership information is available here.

Our Thanks to all who supported the conference. Axxia are this year's Conference sponsor.

For details of the previous year's conference please click here

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8:13 pm on Wednesday, 22 February 2012