What’s happening in the St Albans office?

Charity Support

Deloitte St Albans continues to support the office national charities. In addition St Albans has chosen to support a local charity partner Rennie Grove Hospice Care, who are based in St Albans and provide support to those with a terminal illness. In addition to this support, we take part in a centrally run activity called Community Day, whereby a number of staff give up one day a year to support the local community. Annually St Albans supports the Trinity Day Care Centre, which is a stone’s throw from our office and provides day-care activities for adults with learning disabilities as well as Daylight club, a friendly social club for adults of working age with physical disabilities who live within the City & District of St Albans.

More recently, we have started work with one of the local schools, The Samuel Ryder Academy, through the Deloitte Access programme. The Academy wanted support from Deloitte to offer one-to-one mentoring to Sixth Form students and we also ran an employability day for the students. The aim of the day is to pass on real world skills to the pupils, especially given the fact it is led by graduates who have recent experience of writing CVs and being interviewed. As well as the ongoing mentoring and the employability workshop we have also attended the schools careers’ fair, held mock interviews with the sixth form and attended the school open evening to inform current and prospective parents about our partnership.

Public Sector Audit

The St Albans Public Sector audit and advisory team has approximately 60 people working on a highly diverse portfolio of advisory projects across the sector together with our core external and internal audit assignments. We work with the NHS, Foundation Trusts, Mental Health Trusts, Local Authorities, Universities, Charities and Central Government Bodies across the South East. Recent advisory projects with clients such as University College London Hospital, The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust and Hertfordshire Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust; advisory work on cost improvements; and assurance on a variety of IT and other projects.

Corporate Audit

The St Albans Corporate Audit practice serves a varied portfolio of clients across different sectors including privately owned, private equity backed, foreign owned and listed businesses. Whilst this covers a range of industries as well, the practice is increasingly focussing on clients and targets in the Consumer Business with recent audit wins in the local area including Tesco, Whitbread and Jacobs Douwe Egbert, as well as existing clients like Majestic Wine, Fossil, Monster Energy and Just Eat.

Corporate Tax

The St Albans corporate tax practice is a centre of excellence for foreign owned groups as well as serving a variety of companies from listed to privately owned entrepreneurial businesses across different sectors. In the corporate tax practice, we work with our clients to deal with the heightened focus and complexity of balancing legislation, case law and public perception. In the ever–changing legislative landscape helping clients understand what they need to do to address and keep up to date with these changes has never been as important, alongside working with them on their corporate tax compliance requirements and implications of transactions and restructuring.

VAT

Our VAT advisory team provides clients with advice on a wide range of areas ranging from UK VAT compliance, mergers and acquisitions and business model changes through to dealing with complex international supply chains, IT system configurations and litigation advisory and support. We also provide advice on Customs Duties and import procedures and draw on the network of VAT specialists in other Deloitte Member Firms around the world to provide advice on VAT matters in whichever country you may be doing business. We support our clients to understand the application of complex VAT rules and how these rules impact on their businesses. We also offer support by providing training in a variety of formats from our web-based eLearning offerings through to bespoke training courses.

Mobility and Reward

Our Global Employer Services (GES) team comprises of specialists who support organisations on all matters relating to employee reward and tax compliance both in the UK and internationally. Our Reward team focus on local hires, contingent workers and contractors both in the UK and overseas locations while our Mobility team focus on managing the complex international movement of employees from a corporate and individual perspective.

Forensic Technology

The rapidly growing Forensic Technology practice has expanded into the Deloitte St Albans office. The St Albans Forensic Technology team are engaged by a wide range of clients to perform extensive, complex and often urgent investigations into their business operations and data. The Forensic Technology team use the most advanced technological solutions to retrieve, search and analyse large data sets to enable clients to gather information that can be used to address litigation issues, investigations, regulatory and financial crime requirements. Working with Forensic Technology practices across the world, we provide technology solutions and analytical support to a wide range of clients, from the largest multinational to a small tech start-up.

Social life in St Albans

There is an active social committee within the Deloitte St Albans office. Past activities include a trip to London Zoo, wine and cheese tasting, summer BBQ, the summer ball in St Michael’s Manor and Christmas ball/St Albans office 20th anniversary at Luton Hoo. The social committee also organise and run 2 sports teams within St Albans for Football and Cricket, both of whom take part in a number of friendly fixtures throughout the year as well as the more competitive Deloitte football world cup in Prague, which comes together annually.

The Social committee works closely with the Charity committee to help organise a number of charity fundraising events throughout the year. These include less formal fundraising at the social events to encourage people to give generously but also at formally organised events such as the Herts 10km, Movember, Pink Friday, “Dress down Friday”, St Albans Bake off and many more.