July 11th – July 22th
Over the past two weeks, I have probably spent an equal amount of time at my client site in Cherry Hill, NJ and at the EY office in Philadelphia, and I’m finding that I really like the constant change.
At the client site, I have continued working on my original task, which is updating the Tax Basis Balance Sheet for different jurisdictions. At this point, I have become comfortable with my assignment and it’s amazing how much quicker and easier it has become. No longer am I asking a bunch of questions every few minutes, and work that used to take me two hours to complete now only takes an hour. If there’s downtime at the client site, I usually spend it filing and organizing papers, or doing some other miscellaneous work. With only a full week remaining of my internship, I realize now that I am taking much more away from my client experience than I had originally anticipated.
I’ve definitely learned more about the tax provision process, realized how demanding work can be (many of my team members work more than eight hours a day), and I’ve also come to realize that every job (even an intern’s) is important in its own way. Being able to update a TBBS or even doing some filing means that someone else can devote their time to completing another task. And at the end of the day, I’ve found that I get the most satisfaction from knowing that I’ve made someone else’s job just a little bit easier.
When I’m in the Philadelphia office, my daily routine is a bit different. Usually there isn’t enough work to keep all 10 tax interns busy eight hours a day, so we find ourselves doing a variety of different things. When there is no chargeable work that needs to be completed, we spend our time doing WBL’s (Web-Based Learning simulations), reading EY’s Daily Tax Updates, planning our upcoming Office Olympics or just talking to one another.
But no matter what we spend our time doing, all EY employees are responsible for accurately recording their hours in their GT&E (global time & expense) timesheet. EY has something called a utilization rate which measures an employee’s chargeable rate. Simply put, this is the total number of hours worked divided by the amount of hours spent on client-related activity. It seems that most of the tax interns have pretty good utilization rates and, for the most part, we are all kept busy with an assortment of assignments. But, when we do have spare time in the office, you can be sure none of us are complaining.