OUR HISTORY

RICHARDSON FAMILY’S 65+ YEARS IN ACCOUNTANCY

After leaving school, George David Richardson (my father), started working for Queensland Rail as a clerk. He studied during both nights and weekends to obtain his accountancy qualifications.

Upon obtaining these qualifications, he applied for a position at Queensland Rail as an Internal Auditor. However, the job went to a man 20 years his senior. As Dad was in his twenties at the time, he decided to leave Queensland Rail and obtained a position with TAXATION SERVICE ACCOUNTANTS LTD (TSA) in 1947.

This accounting firm visited many Queensland towns to complete the small businesses accounts and tax returns, as most small towns in Queensland did not have resident accountants. The price of preparing the businesses accounts and tax returns for the year back then was five pounds per business. The company had a policy of offering lifelong accountancy for 100 pounds and several clients took up this offer. However, when these clients moved an inaccessible place, it forced TSA to follow. They would encourage those clients to recruit more clients in that district to enable TSA to cover the cost of getting there.

Dad first visited Bowen in 1948, which commenced our association with the town.

In those days, the roads in Queensland were terrible. The accountants mainly visited the country towns by travelling on the train or by whatever other means they could find. Dad would tell of sleeping on the benches on railway stations while waiting for the train to come in the middle of the night. At some railway stations there would be a wagon which was to be connected to the train coming through at two or three in the morning, and he would sleep in this carriage hoping they would not forget to connect the carriage to the train when it came through. On other occasions, he would get from A to B by unconventional means. He told another tale of getting from Jericho to Blackall in the back of the local ambulance when a footballer broke his leg, and needed to go to Blackall for medical treatment.

Dad married Iris Ferguson on the 14th May 1949, and in line with our family’s attitude of always looking after our clients, he visited some clients where they were honeymooning.

Taxation Service Accountants Ltd was a public company and some of these clients owned shares in the company. Dad’s dedication to his clients’ led to some of these clients gifting the shares to him, in gratitude. Another young accountant working for the company also acquired shares in a similar manner. In approximately 1952, there was a major disagreement with the manager, who decided to fire these two young accountants.

However, they discovered they were the majority shareholders in the company. So they called a company meeting to sack the manager. Then, they acquired the rest of the company shares. Several years later, they admitted another young accountant into the business and the three of them jointly owned TSA.

Many think the occupation of a boring accountant is a very safe profession, but not for the Richardson family. The most serious incident occurred in 1957, when Iris was pregnant with their third child. By then the roads in Queensland had improved and the accountants at TSA had company cars.

On this particular day in 1957, Dad was belting along on a gravel road near Banana when he hit a very bad patch and promptly lost control of the car. The Austin A90 rolled four times. His assistant was lucky to stay in the car. The boot flew open and all the files, papers and records were scattered all over the bush. The windscreen fell out in one piece, and Dad flew out after it. He ended up lying on his back on the road, the car beside him teetering on it wheels. It was going to fall either on him or back onto its wheels. Thankfully, it fell back on its wheels. Neither of them were seriously hurt, and they managed to pick up all the files and records from around the bush. They were never sure if they got everything, but they never noticed anything missing.

They say you can never put old head on young shoulders. Even as kids, when Dad showed his slides of his various visits around Queensland, we always wanted to see the ones of this accident. Many years later, I was on my yearly visit to my western clients. It was only three days after taking delivery of my brand new Toyota Landcruiser station wagon. I was bounding down the road from Collinsville to Mount Colon, when I hit two holes on the gravel road and lost control. Luckily, the car didn’t roll, but I ended up in a deep ditch on the right side of the road. On the left, there were many rocks and trees but fortunately nothing to hit on the right side. I drove back up the embankment and headed on my way somewhat slower.

After that, I never put the Landcruiser in fifth gear on a dirt road in order to keep the speed down. There were many more incidents on the road over the years while on the way to visit clients, but the above two were the most serious.

On his travels around Queensland in 1960, Dad became the accountant for South Mole Island. As we still lived in Brisbane at the time, the family used to visit the island free of charge during the school holidays, while Dad worked on the accounts. Us three kids ran all over the island and went on all the cruises including many trips to the reef.

Dad was a chronic asthmatic who found that his asthma improved greatly when he was on the island and in the Proserpine district.

In 1966, Dad and his partners had several disagreements about running the business. The other two offered him a sum of money, plus the client group from Mackay to Gumlu and west to Barcaldine. He decided to take this offer and leave the firm. South Mole also offered more work if he was closer, as they had difficulty finding and keeping clerical staff. We therefore left Brisbane at the end of 1966, and headed north to Airlie Beach with a caravan in tow.

When we left Brisbane, I had just turned 14 and had failed five of my Grade 9 subjects. I absolutely hated everything to do with school and this reflected in my results. However, I had done very well in bookkeeping, the only subject that made any sense to me. By this stage, I had spent some time helping at TSA in the school holidays, and been on a trip with Dad to the Monto office. I spent the week there helping on a dairy farm, which probably sparked my later interest in farming.

On arriving at Airlie, I started at Proserpine State High school. Dad wasn’t going to spend money on boarding school for a kid who wouldn’t study. I was studying bookkeeping by correspondence, and doing quite well, but not in anything else. Dad said to me one day the only thing I could do was come work for him, as no one else would give me a job with my results. I liked that idea, and this is where my career in the accountancy business began.

If I wanted accounting qualification, the first thing I needed to do was pass junior. I managed to scrape through grade 10. On the very afternoon of my last exam, I started working with Dad. We headed off on my first trip to meet our clients out west. This was a revelation, as life out there was still somewhat backward - with corrugated iron houses and no lining. They were as hot as hell in summer, and freezing cold in winter. We stayed in various hotels - but some didn’t even have hot water. This was an unpleasant experience in the dead of winter: having a cold shower.

At that stage, we did most of the work for the clients at their place of business or in their homes, as computers had not yet entered our lives. I had an adding machine but Dad insisted I add the figures up in my head and check them with the adding machine.

I will always remember one client in Blackall who had many kids. They had a butchers shop and Mrs Fletcher was a speech and music teacher. We would do their books on their dining room table, which took all day. However, by three o’clock, all the kids would come home from school, as well as her pupils. It was very interesting. She would be doing a music lesson in one corner of the lounge room, and a speech lesson in another corner of the lounge room. We were in the middle of the room. She would be yelling at all the kids along with answering our questions.

Life was quite interesting on the road as an accountant’s assistant. At the time, most of the roads out west were gravel at best, and you had to contend with bull dust or mud. The road to cross the Drummond Range was terrible. This is now the main highway from Rocky to Longreach, but back then, it was so bad most people tried not to use it.

One day we were travelling from Emerald to Alpha, one of the worst roads we drove on at the time. On the Alpha side, the road was badly bulldusted. Dad hit a hole, and the motor stopped. We waited for hours for someone to come along, and Dad went into Alpha to see our mechanic client who sent his son out, but couldn’t find the problem. He had to go back to Alpha to get his father. Ultimately, Dad had knocked a wire of the automatic transmission, which had shut the motor down. We had left Emerald just after lunch and arrived in Alpha (no more than a two-hour drive) at about 10pm.

We had many incidents on the road due to the bad state of the roads. We always carried two tyres and extra fuel. Four-wheel drive cars were not common then and we would have a steel plate attached to all the vital parts under the car to guard against bottoming out.

To become an accountant, I had to pass Grade 12 in order to go to university. I started my studies by correspondence at night and weekends. The first two years I did English and Maths 1. I found English to be extremely difficult - probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Without extra coaching from a client of ours, Mrs Del Demartini, I would never have passed.

The next year was when Cyclone Ada destroyed Airlie Beach and Shute Harbour. At that time, I was studying bookkeeping and economics, the only subjects that made any sense to me. I passed with flying colours that year. In my third and final year, I had to study geography.

I went to university full time and during the holidays, came home to work. As soon as I’d finished my exams, I had the ute packed up and ready to go. I was getting away from the sheer boredom of uni, and I was helping dad. The work had not gone away just because I was at school. I would work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, until I had to return to the big smoke for more torturous university. However, I knew I had to get through it.

I was at university one day when I got a call from Dad. He wanted to buy the practice owned by Mr Gordon Trounce in Bowen. This would mean the business would be big enough for the two of us when I finished university. We took over at the beginning of June 1973. Now it was even more critical for me to pull my weight. I asked Dad to send down some work for our western clients, and then I did as much as I could. Then I flew up to be with him on the west trip. When I went home, there was no such thing as an afternoon off. I had to help from the second I arrived home, until the second I left. Dad could not afford to employ an accountant at that time, even if we could have found one to help.

Eventually, I graduated with excellence, and returned home to Airlie Beach. But it wasn’t all bliss once I returned home. Dad’s health started to deteriorate, and he began spending quite a lot of time in hospital. This was quite challenging for me, as I was only twenty. I had to run the place myself when Dad went to hospital for several weeks.

On our western trip in 1980, we took one of our office ladies, Julie O’Brien, with us. We had to do the Shire audits, but Dad became very sick in Aramac. The Air Ambulance flew him to Rockhampton. We followed in the car and stayed for several days until I knew he was going to survive, as the doctors didn’t think he would. Julie and I returned west to finish the audits on our own. This was another challenge, as I had not done it before but I had the necessary qualifications. Thankfully, we finished them between us, on top of visiting the clients. It was during this trip that the two of us became a little friendlier, and romance eventually blossomed.

Unfortunately, at the end of June 1981, Dad had a bad asthma attack. I took him to the Proserpine hospital first thing in the morning. Dad thanked me for bringing him in and told me to go to Bowen, as I would have a lot to do with him in hospital, so I did. However, his condition worsened, and they transferred him to Mackay. At 5:45am on the 3rd July 1981, we received a phone call saying he’d had a heart attack, and the doctors were working on him. An hour later, while we were getting ready to go to Mackay, our local doctor turned up, saying Dad had passed away.

For the next eighteen months, I tried to keep the business together. After realising this was impossible, I reluctantly sold the Airlie Beach practice in June 1983. I moved to Bowen and lived in the back room, now Lori’s room, until Julie and I were married on the 25th May 1986. We moved into the house I’d bought on the Euri Creek farm.

By this time, the age of the computer had arrived. When I was at uni, one of my major was IT. Therefore, when I returned to Airlie, I spent many hours working on the huge computer with only a small capacity. Nonetheless, it used helped us significantly improved our process.

So I dived into computers around June 1982, when I bought the $20,000 system Dad and I looked at just before he died. At that time, one of our staff built a house for $28,000. Computers brought us back into the office. The clients now gave us their records, instead of us going to them. Our Bowen clients were already used to this. However, I still did my trip to other parts of Queensland including west to Longreach, north to Cairns and south to Brisbane. Usually I only visited these clients on a yearly basis.

Another major issue in the practice started in 1980. Mt Sugarloaf Forest, a group who specialised in the growing of pine forests, approached us to see if there was any land suitable in the Bowen or Proserpine region to grow pine trees. There wasn’t, and they ended up buying land near Lowmead, north of Bundaberg. Dad thought the combined tax benefits and potential income from the investment was one of the best deals he’d ever seen.

Subsequently, he mentioned it to most of our clients, and our clients owned about half of the forest. The taxation department allowed some of our clients their tax deduction but not others, including both Dad (who had passed away by then) and I. This lead to the biggest argument I’ve had with the taxation department, which took the next ten years to resolve.

Mt Sugarloaf took a test case to the court and won. Some of the clients received their tax deduction, but a large number didn’t including Dad and I. So I became the test case for the rest of us. The lawyers originally booked three days for my case to go before the administrative appeals tribunal. However, this didn’t even get us started. They booked another week, and but we still couldn’t finish and had to do a few more days. All the lawyers involved said the judge would have to decide this quickly. Otherwise, he would not be able to understand all the issues.

Many months went by, so I contacted the solicitor involved to ask about the case. He replied saying the judge had cancer and was obviously on sick leave. Eventually the judge recovered and came back at work. Soon after however, the solicitor rang and advised that the judge had died without handing down a decision. Panic now settled in; would we have to do this all over again?

This basis for this case was in a 20-year management fee claim. By this point, the government had changed the law, and you could only claim expenses 13 months in advance. They decided this case was no longer very important, and gave us all our tax deductions.

However, when they started to issue the amended assessments, I advised the tax department that the way they were issuing the assessments would not calculate the proper interest we were to be paid. He said that the computer would handle it, but it didn’t. So I put in a government claim for an Act of Grace Payment. The tax department officer told me later it took him 400 hours to complete the submission to the treasury. I claimed the extra interest not paid, along with our cost to work it out. They didn’t pay my costs, but I ended up getting $40,000 in extra interest for our clients.

The accountancy business has become very complex since my father first started in 1947. In those days, all he needed was a fountain pen, some paper, and a small book of rules. During the late 1970s, he used to say to our clients that the business had become very complicated in his 30 years and he hated to think how complicated it will become by the time I was his age. I am now past the age Dad was when he said this, and accounting is now so complicated that it’s almost impossible for us to understand the rules. If it wasn’t for our associations advisory line to help us understand the complexity of the rules, I don’t think we would be able to continuing practicing.

The computer has made our work easier and more efficient. However, it has taken the variety out of the work and all the stories of the past. I now only do one trip a year to see clients in other parts of Queensland. The daily grind happens at the office. Laptops make it possible to visit clients much more easily and maybe this may become more common again.

My eldest daughter, Samantha, has her university degree in accountancy and is presently working in Toronto. I don’t know where the future of the profession lies, but if the complexity continues along the same progression, in 30 years the average person will have no ability to comprehend the rules.

I hope for the client’s sake this does not happen.