Hi, my name is Mike Little and welcome to Open Tuition, the largest ACCA learning website. In this video, I'm going to introduce you to the ACCA's Corporate and Business Law examination, English variant, and explain to you how you may most usefully use the material on our website to help you pass the ACCA's Corporate and Business Law exam. Many of you will be, inverted commas, frightened of the prospect of learning law.
When we start going through the lectures and you watch the videos and you read the course notes, you'll notice that there are a lot of cases, case names, and in the study text, they even give the case dates, as well as all the details of the case and the decision that the court found. So it's quite a daunting prospect. Let me say now and make it absolutely clear. There is no need for you to remember case names, case dates, whether they were reported in the Times or the All England Law Reports. There's no need for any of that.
There's no need to remember the names or titles of statute, of acts of Parliament, nor the dates, nor the section numbers. There is no kudos, there is no mark, there is no reward for learning all of that. What you must learn is the principle of law that those cases did establish. And just occasionally, in a scenario-type question in the exam, the facts in the scenario bear a close resemblance to the facts of a decided case. If you can recall that case, not the name, but if you can recall the case and the principle that that case established or confirmed, then you're well on the way to scoring those marks.
The syllabus. The essential elements of the legal system is right at the start. It's not a major part of the syllabus, but nevertheless you have to know it, and it will be worth one or two questions within the exam, and therefore you can't afford to skip it.
In fact, in the current format of the exam, you can't afford to look at any part of the syllabus and say, oh, I don't like that, and skip it, because with the format which I will explain in a few moments, with the format as it is, the examiner has the opportunity to ask you right the way across the syllabus. So essentially elements of the English legal system. And below that we then have law of obligations. This is a major section.
This is contract law. This affects you because you enter into contracts. Your contract of employment, your contract of getting on to public transport, your contract of buying and paying for electricity. They're all contracts that you are entering into every day of your life. So the law of obligations or contract law is a major part of the syllabus and will most likely account for a substantial proportion of those marks.
Then we get to employment law. And again, you are affected. You either are in employment now or you will, sometime in the future, be in employment.
Or sometime in the future you will be an employer. So employment law... It's the one which directly affects us all, or has affected us all at some time in the past. Then we come to formation and constitution of business organizations.
Business organizations include sole traders, where you operate on your own, agencies, where you act as an agent of another organization, partnerships, where you take on a partner or multiple partners to create a bigger firm than just a sole trader. and company businesses, businesses operated as a company, whether it be a private company or a public company. And we look at all of these, I look at all of these separate elements within the lectures and the course notes cover all these different topics. Within this formation constitution and these business organisations, we have three subheadings. We have capital and financing of the business, whether it is capital...
whether it's financed by the sole trader individually, or by the partners injecting capital into the partnership firm, or a company offering its shares either to friends and relatives or to the public at large. So we look at capital and financing. Are you going to issue shares?
Are you going to use your savings? Are you going to borrow money from a bank? All of these we should look at.
Management, administration and regulation of companies. A big area. Management, the offices of the company, the directors, the company secretary, and for this purpose, the auditors as well.
So the management, the administration, and what is legally required for a company to do every year. and the regulation of companies, how the law governs the operation of companies. So all of this is, again, it's everyday stuff and it's stuff that you will come across.
You may be employed by a company, you may be an auditor in an auditor company, you may deal with companies, or your parents or siblings may be directors of company. This is vibrant stuff, this is real life active stuff and it's very... Phenomenally interesting. Insolvency law, where a company is nearing death, where it's not done so well. There are rules, there are laws with the operation of the process of killing off a company.
When a company is insolvent, are we going to liquidate it with a liquider, by a liquidator, by a receiver, by an administrator? All of these we will look at and consider within lectures. Now, a federal little picture of these different elements. Overall, the overall picture is we have the essential elements.
And then beneath that, we have these three major subdivisions. We have law of obligations and employment law, and then the formation and constitution of business organizations. And that has three subdivisions itself.
So we then have capital and financing, management, administration and regulation, and insolvency law. Pervasive throughout the entire elements of these separate elements of the law syllabus, pervasive throughout, we have this final one, which is corporate fraud and criminal behaviour. Because fraud and criminal behaviour will apply and can apply throughout the law syllabus, the law of obligations. We can be criminal. You enter into a contract to kill somebody.
Well clearly that's criminal behaviour. Employment law, criminal behaviour, treating people as independent agents whereas in fact they are employed. Criminal behaviour, capital and financing, borrowing money without any intention of paying it back.
So all of these are pervasive throughout or are all affected by this concept of corporate fraud and criminal behaviour. And we will look at insider dealing, money laundering, wrongful trading, fraudulent trading, abuse of company name, and most recently, the Bribery Act of 2010. Let's have a quick look at the syllabus. The exam itself is computer-based, but there is a paper-based alternative, depending where you are in the world, or whether there is a computer facility available for you.
So, it's basically a computer-based exam, but there is this paper-based alternative. The format is the same. There's one slight difference because obviously if it's a paper-based alternative, you need to be writing, where if it's a computer-based exam, you're typing. 25 objective test questions in Section A, that's worth 50 marks.
And 20 objective test questions worth 1 mark each, that's a further 20 marks. And then we have 5 multi-task questions. These are worth 6 marks.
That's 6 marks. maybe subdivided into 2-2-2, or it could be a 4-2 split, it could even be a 3-3 split. So we have, for the computer-based exam, clearly you're going to have multiple choice options here, where you select the appropriate ones as your answer. But so five questions of six marks each will give me another 30, that gives me 100%.
It's a two-hour exam, all questions are compulsory. If I move on to the paper-based format, section A and section B are exactly the same. Multiple choice objective test questions for 50 marks, and another section B for 20 marks, and then section C. With section C, you have physically to handwrite on paper, whereas with the computer-based, you're typing on a keyboard.
So instead of two hours, you get an additional 15 minutes. to compensate you, really, to reflect the manual effort that is involved when you're having to write on paper. But if, again, we have these 2-2-2 split or 4-2 or 3-3 split, you're only writing very brief notes.
To get two marks you need two sentences, to get four marks you need four sentences, and I'm not talking long sentences here. How much can you write in 1 minute 20 seconds. That's what effectively what you're asking yourself. And of course, if you feel that you can't answer any part of these questions, move on. Don't get bogged down on any individual question.
For the multiple choice questions, in doing the computer-based exam, it will be a criminal act to leave that exam room without at least having attempted all the questions. Pass mark is 50%. The pass mark is 50% in every single ACCA exam.
So the pass mark again, 50%. Moving on. the links and where the law paper fits within the overall ACCA examination structure. The law paper is indirectly linked to, it's only an indirect link, to financial reporting.
On the same level, we have the law paper. and it links indirectly to financial reporting and it also links indirectly to audit and assurance. It's only indirectly.
Financial reporting does have an element of legality within it and audit and assurance does have an element of legality within it, but it's only indirectly. It is assumed knowledge for these other two papers at the same level. This is applied skills level.
and you are expected to know the law insofar as it affects financial reporting and audited assurance. And there is also an indirect link to strategic business reporting at the strategic professional level, but it has no direct links with any other paper. This is unusual.
It is unique. Amongst all the ACCA papers, this one has no direct links with any other paper. Moving on again, what do we offer you? We offer you free material. We're a group of volunteers.
We write our own material, we prepare our own lectures, we put them on our own website, and we invite you, as students around the world, to take the Law English Variant exam. Our own notes, our own lectures. Here's examples of the notes.
You can hear examples of the lectures if you go onto our website and click on Listen to the Videos or Watch the Lectures. So we have our own notes there. We have our own forums.
So there are two. There's the Ask the Tutor and the General Forum. This is the General Forum.
This is the Ask the Tutor Forum. The general forum is there for you to post your own questions and other students are invited to answer those questions. They may have come across the same problem themselves. The other forum is directly addressed to us, the tutors. So if you have a technical problem and you want to resolve it, and you want to resolve it by me answering it, you will post your question on the Ask the Tutor forum and I shall get back to you.
I shall answer your question. So we have those... facilities for you to either ask other students generally or specifically to ask me.
One thing I will ask you is that you don't, as a student, answer questions that are on the Ask the Tutor forum. Those questions are addressed to me, so answer them by all means if they're on the General Forum but not on Ask the Tutor. There is another free element available to you and that's articles. technical articles that you'll find within Student Accountant magazine. The nature of the law paper is that there are very, very, very few changes from one year to the next.
The most recent major change was back in 2010 with the passing of the Bribery Act and that then became part of the law syllabus. But other than that there have been very, very few and even if there were changes they're only cosmetic, technical, minor changes. So there are very few articles in Student Accountant related to the law paper. However, those that are there, you should read.
How can you help us? You can spread the word to your colleagues, to friends and fellow students at university and your colleges, to your brothers and sisters who may be thinking about coming into accountancy. who may be doing GCSEs and A-levels at school.
Well, we have material available and appropriate for them as well. spread the word by talking to friends and colleagues wherever you may be. I have discovered this wonderful free website.
Subscribe to our YouTube page that would help us as well. And I'm asking you to help us because it's only by increasing our student population that we can become stronger and by becoming stronger we are able to extend the material, the quantity and the quality. of material that we have available for you.
So, subscribe to the YouTube, and help the students on the forums. Not the one forum, the general forum, but there's a general forum for each separate paper. That would help us. I said at the start, we're the only free website that teaches and helps accountancy students. I do hope you'll stay with us.
I do hope you'll be successful in pursuing your choice of qualification and that in later life you will remember us and say well contusion helped me.