All Too Familiar, which was created in partnership with HMRC, is set around a fictional accountancy firm, Nickel Turner LLP. The drama explores the firm’s relationship with a long-term client who receives a significant injection of money to support his ailing restaurant chain.
The film raises several themes for discussion, including how familiarity can affect professional scepticism and judgement, and what levels of customer due diligence and risk assessment are appropriate for client relationships.
When the film launched earlier this year, Sophie Parkhouse, technical and training partner at Albert Goodman, had already seen ICAEW’s previous educational dramas False Assurance and Without Question.
“Given that these were fantastically put together and really engaging, I was confident All Too Familiar would be just as good,” she explains.
Keeping it relevant
Sophie decided to use the film to encourage firm-wide discussions around AML culture. Albert Goodman, which employs around 300 people in five offices across the South West of England, provides accountancy, tax, financial planning and business advisory services to a range of clients.
To focus the film’s content across different service lines, Sophie split people into their departments and got each department to watch the film together in a group forum. “Afterwards, we facilitated discussions around the different scenarios,” she explains. “So we broke people out into smaller groups, and gave them each a topic to discuss.”
These groups then came back into the main forum where everyone got to debate the thoughts and points people had raised within their discussion groups. “Because we were focusing on specific service lines, we asked: ‘How would that apply in your particular area?’” says Sophie.
“We made sure it was specific,” she adds, “and we asked people to think about how these circumstances might arise in the work they did, and were there elements in the film to which they could relate?”
Each of the break-out groups used the questions and model answers provided in ICAEW’s learning materials as a starting point. “But then I was in the room to make it relevant to the work they do on a day-to-day basis,” Sophie explains.
“For example, I’d say: “Okay, so how would that apply to what you do? What might a trigger look like in your department and how is that relevant? What would you do about that? What do our current processes look like around that?”
Embedding culture
The depiction of AML culture within the film’s fictional firms offered a useful way of opening up discussions about Albert Goodman’s own culture. There were a lot of questions being asked by the partners – the senior people in the fictional firms – around whether source of funds checks had been made and were all AML checks complete, explains Sophie.
“So we really focused on that,” she says, “in terms of what is the flow of the questions around AML in our firm and how can we ensure that all of our people feel empowered to raise these questions and challenge responses” To this end, she asked the groups questions such as: What would you do if you were told by a Partner that all of the AML checks had been done but you could not see them on the file? How would you push back to this and to whom would you go if you were not satisfied?
A key aim was to drive home the message that doing the right checks should continually be in people’s thought processes and ingrained in whatever they are doing. Although these checks have long been known as the AML checks, Sophie wants to move this on and “rebrand” to more of a “know your client process”.
The film has proved a useful tool for encouraging this shift. “All we're actually doing,” she stresses, “is making sure that we do know the client – that’s all these questions are really looking for us to do. And, if we know our client, not only is it good from a risk perspective, but it's also good from a service perspective in that the more you know about your client, the more you can support them, and the more added value you can give. That was what I was really trying to bring out.”
Sharing across service lines
The film-based workshops have already had an impact. “Generally we work on a model whereby a partner will own a relationship with a client, but the client will have multiple touch points and multiple service services that they use throughout the firm,” Sophie explains.
“What the film has done is made people so much more aware that while, for example, they might operate the payroll, they still need to make the engagement partner aware of any concerns or problems or queries in relation to a client, because it impacts the overall picture.”
“If any service line has concerns, everybody working for that client needs to be made aware of those concerns,” she explains, “so that the information can impact our risk assessment, the questions we ask and how sceptical we are when we're engaging with that client.”
“I think it's definitely given people more awareness around that,” she says. “And it's encouraged us to share our risk assessments a lot more with other people throughout the firm.”
Feedback across the firm so far has been very positive. “I think everybody said to me: ‘Wow, that was really good training. It was really engaging, and I could watch it again. I hope there are more films like this.’”
She believes the film’s scenarios and content already have a very wide reach, but she also points out that it's down to each individual practice to make it relevant to their circumstances. “The impact in any firm is going to be dependent upon the person who's delivering the training,” she says, “and making sure you embed it into your current processes and systems.”
Resources
Read how All Too Familiar is supporting training across a range of accountancy practices:
