Throughout the month everyone in the office has attended several trainings. While not everyone has been required to go to all of them it was highly recommended that I went along to all of them if possible. The first 3 were part of a "continuing professional development in-house" required program and each session ran for 1 1/2 hrs. The first day covered GST, FBT and the GST rate change and the second two days covered Logics and LTCs.
As 11am rolled around everyone grabbed their notepads and rolled their chairs into the conference room. One of the more tech-savvy people in the office set up the webinar training and this is how we resumed work after morning tea for three consecutive days. The GST training was actually very helpful as I have worked with GST every day that I have been here and it was good to have some formal training on how the system works. The LAQC and LTC trainings were a little harder to grasp as I didn't even really understand the acronyms going into the sessions. (Turns out that Logics are really just companies with special tax provisions. This qualification is very important for some companies as it allows them to allocate their rental property costs to shareholders which ultimately lowers their provisional tax liability.)
During each of these trainings we are given the opportunity to send in questions to the team running the session. Several times other clients participating have sent in questions and it was always good to hear instant feedback on questions that we may have had during the session.
About a week later we had another training session. This time it was led by on of our audit team members and was on Working for Families Tax Credits (WFFTC). This short session served as a reminder to all staff members to check that their clients were not eligible for these credits or were not claiming credits where they were not entitled.
The final training session was held as another webinar and covered investment income. This session covered income from equity, income from debt and income from foreign investments and was a lot to absorb in 1 hour. But, like previous times, those running the session were open to questions and stayed on after the training had finished to answer any queries people had.
As a rising sophomore I haven't exactly had too many tax, accounting or foreign investment classes; however, it was interesting to be at each of the trainings and find out how much I could both understand and learn. I now also have a little background in New Zealand tax law should I come back to this side of the world to work again!