August Profile: Sinead Donovan
Author:
Mary Canniffe
A passion for accounting and the benefit of sound advice from wise parents has brought Sinead Donovan to where she is today. On May 1st she was appointed a partner at Grant Thornton. At 32 years of age she is the first ever female partner at the firm – one woman among 22 men - and one of the younger appointments at this level. She specialises in audit and assurance services.
From as far back as she can remember Sinead always wanted to be an accountant. She was always fascinated by the work her accountant dad, Cecil, did, while not attracted at all to a career in the field of medicine represented at home by her physiotherapist mum , Morag. As it turned out, accounting is well represented in the second generation of Donovans. Of the four siblings, Sinead and her brother Andrew are now accountants, Ian is a banker while her only sister Siobhan lectures in German in University College Dublin.
“I always wanted to be an accountant. Maybe initially that was because it was what Dad did. I chose it at school and I loved it. I really liked the logic of the double entry system. It just clicked with me. I was very bad at languages while my sister was very good at them. I think it boils down to whatever way your mind works”, she explained.
She is firmly convinced that having a sound grasp of the double entry system is critical to being an effective accountant.
“However complex a problem or an issue it will always come back down to debits and credits. That is why it is so crucial in accounting education that we continue to educate students in double entry. I have noticed that some of the trainees from some universities do not have the best grounding in double entry. They could go out and write a thesis but they would find it difficult to do a bank reconciliation. This is something the Institute has got to get to grips with, and is getting to grips with, in fairness. But I do not think it should be our sole responsibility.”
Sinead’s own route into the profession was not through university. While she got her first choice at university after the Leaving Certificate, she decided she did not want to sit in a lecture hall and do a B.Comm and then decide after three years to become an accountant. She wanted to go “straight for it”. Taking the advice of her father, she opted instead for the two year full time commencement course then available at the College of Commerce in Rathmines. This was followed by four years of training and studying at night. Her training was with Ormbsy and Rhodes, then a three partner firm.
“That was a conscious decision of mine, I suppose in conjunction with my father, to do my training in a small firm. I felt I would get a better grounding, I would get to see the basics in everything. |I would still very much hold true to that view. And even though Grant Thornton is a bigger firm, we have the smaller firm ethos because we are a number of small firms who have merged together. So we very much carry that through in our training of students. We take in about 20 students a year, split between about 15 in audit and the balance in tax and corporate finance”.
She has been very involved in the education and training programme of the Institute and believes training is becoming more and more critical for a student’s development. “You cannot just rely on the education, especially when we see the shortcomings in graduates from some of the university courses”.
When she qualified in 1996, Sinead had a crisis. At age 23 and after six years of training, she decided she did not want to be an accountant. That is when the wise counsel of her parents again prevailed. Rather than advising her to stick with it, they suggested she take three months out to assess what she wanted. She went off to Ballymaloe in Cork to do a cookery course.
“It was a great course and great fun and I got away from everything but I also realised that accounting was not that bad!”
Crisis over, it was back to Dublin to resume the accounting career. Sinead joined Arthur Andersen, aiming to get Big 5 experience and exposure.
“It was incredibly different from working in a small firm, far more pressurised with very defined reporting and management structures. On the plus side there was huge technical support as well as huge peer support to bounce ideas about, there was experience of bigger clients and different issues. However, you do have to remember that everything comes back down to the same thing - its accounting at the end of the day. So, whether you are auditing a multinational or a corner shop it is the same principles and this experience really did help to reinforce that because you are thrown into the deep end at a big firm, there is no double about that you sink or swim. I really enjoyed the experience.”
After a year at AA, Sinead got the travel bug and headed for Australia where she worked at AA in Sydney for six months and spent six months travelling followed by three months in New Zealand. After just thee weeks in Sydney she met a neighbour from Blackrock, another accountant Larry Behan, who would become her husband.
“It was a wonderful experience. Because I went as a qualified accountant as well as being able to get good experience, I was able to earn good money, which allowed me to travel and do things I would not otherwise have been able to afford. I loved Australia and New Zealand. Because I went out on my own it probably made me more confident. Travel is huge in anyone’s life just like changing workplaces. It forces you to challenge yourself, to move outside your comfort zone, to test yourself and push boundaries, to adapt to different cultures.”
Sinead was no stranger to challenges. Along with her husband she loves sport. At school she played hockey and represented her province and country at table tennis (junior level). Her sport now is golf - the only woman at Grant Thornton who plays and one of an annual total of about three female accountants who attend the Institute’s golf outing at Rosses Point.
“It is a fantastic outing. There is great camaraderie and craic. The average age of the outing is about 40 – I have probably brought it down! I would encourage other woman as well as younger accountants to get involved. Any image of a stuffy outing is very far from the truth”.
Home from Australia in January 1999, Sinead decided she wanted to get experience in industry and joined Elan Corporation in group reporting based in Dublin. At that time Elan was the darling of the Stock Exchange and it was an exciting and pressurised work environment. But in January 2002 the shares price collapsed - the change in its fortunes have been well publicised. For Sinead it was a huge learning experience.
“I was involved in consolidation of group figures and was not involved in the decision making process. I was aware of the accounting issues but I was never asked to do anything improper. It was very interesting to see how such a huge corporation worked when under intense pressure and to see the huge power of the media and how a firm’s handling of public relations can be so important”.
By mid 2002 she knew it was time to move on and started to look around, knowing that she wanted to move back from industry to practice.
“I did not like the monotony of monthly figures and I did not like being office based all the time. And I wanted to get more involved in the Institute. While Elan was supportive of my involvement, industry generally does not see any great advantage from having employees involved in the Institute. But it is seen as a huge benefit to practice, both in terms of being in touch with issues and in networking for the firm. So practice was going to be much more supportive of my Institute involvement.”
Why was she so enthusiastic about the Institute?
“When I passed my finals they rang and asked me to start correcting papers. And when I returned from Australia I started lecturing on professional 3. I suppose I was interested initially because my father was so involved and once you show an interest you will get sucked in and I started to get asked to go on committees! But I really believe in it. As a professional you need a member body to protect integrity of the profession and to protect its members. And once you see the work that is done in the Institute both at executive level and on a voluntary basis you just get blown away by how much time these people are willing to give and you look at who they are and see they are upstanding and busy people and you think there has to be something right there.… If the Institute was not there, there would be no-one protecting the profession and that is paramount to us as accountants because our bedrock is our ethics.”
Her Institute involvement has spiralled. Sinead has just been elected to the Council, is a member of the Accounting Committee and is chairman of the Young Professionals. She devotes about 350 hours annually to Institute business, she reckons.
In Grant Thornton since December 2002, she is now one of 12 audit partners nationally. She is pleased to have been made a partner but it is not a position she accepted without due consideration.
“I was glad to see that my hard work had paid off but I also had to consider if I was prepared for the huge responsibility involved. I had friends at Arthur Anderson and I had seen the impact of the collapse on the partners. So it was a hard decision and it is an onerous responsibility. But at the end of the day I know and trust the people I am in practice with.”
She has never experienced any gender discrimination and feels that the low numbers of female partners/directors in the profession may reflect decisions being made by women themselves over the course of their careers.
“It is harder for women in business. They have the difficult choices to make. If they decide to have a family they have to take maternity leave and make childcare choices that can impact on a career so there is often a natural fall-off in the numbers coming up. At manager level if you miss six months you have missed a lot, say, compared with a peer who hasn’t taken time out. But I am hopeful that at a certain level this is the type of career where you could work from home or combine work and family. It really depends on getting good support of work colleagues”.
As well as the education and training of students to ensure well rounded professionals who can communicate with clients, Sinead cites the other current key issues for the Institute and the profession as ensuring that a strong code of ethics is maintained and coping with increasing regulation and compliance requirements. On ethics she feels the Institute needs to take a strict stance with members “who get it wrong” and to do this in an open and transparent manner.
Outside work Sinead is a skiing fan – she skied in Argentina last year - and she loves to travel to places where she can’t be reached by mobile phone – a recent trip involved a safari in South Africa. She has played tag rugby in the past but now just supports her husband Larry’s involvement in rugby, often helping out by sipping a Jack Daniels on the sideline. Weekends off from golf and rugby are often spent at a family house in Courtown.
With her admittance to partnership at Grant Thornton Sinead has reaped the rewards of her hard work and career focus. But with her zest for life Sinead has ensured that she has had plenty of fun along the way.