After listening to the lecture surrounding management accounting, I became intrigued by the concept. Not only because I couldn’t grasp why anyone would be interested in regular accounting over this more risk-driven side of accounting, but also because I wondered why I hadn’t been exposed to this field before. I had taken business classes, discussed the many different fields and major options with my two business professional parents, but this side of accounting had never come up. I begun doing a bit of research and found an article discussing just that.

Titled “Accounting For the Real World”, this article relayed in interview with Ben Mulling, the CFO of TENTE Casters Inc.The article discussed how there is a knowledge gap for accountants who finish their degree and the skills required for real world accounting jobs. When asked about this, Ben responded, “Yes, I think schools need to build in more management accounting principles…They aren’t teaching enough basic management accounting terminology, strategy, decision support, and organizational management from an accounting point of view.“ He goes on to discuss that even if you receive your degree in accounting, you need to possess a more versatile skill set. As a management accountant you will be dealing with more than just numbers.  For me, this interview was interesting because I always viewed accounting its own separate entity. There were the numbers and there were the people who enjoyed dealing with those numbers.  In reality, accounting is much more involved than that.  Accountants, too, need to develop important interpersonal, group related skills.

On Tuesday, a court of appeals in California rejected Google Inc.’s attempt to get a privacy lawsuit against them dismissed. Street View Maps is part of Google’s “maps” product that offers 360 panoramic viewing and street level imagery. But according to the plaintiffs involved in the lawsuit, Google collected more than just photographs while capturing the “inhabited world”.  They collected email, passwords, personal images and other information from unencrypted home computer networks, a process which involves intercepting and decoding the data. Google’s defense: the information was “readily accessible to the general public.” Well, the California Court system is not sympathetic to their plea and the suit will proceed, possibly leading to serious monetary repercussions for even a company of Google’s size. Considering the amount of press and controversy online privacy has received in the U.S. of late, the public is informing Google and it’s peers that this sort of unethical invasion of privacy will not be tolerated. Google was also recently connected with In the age of technology, IT companies must learn, and fast, that the ethical standards in business apply to all forms of communication and that sometimes all the money in the world can’t cover up bad ethics.