Financial Leadership Forum: excellence, leadership and vision delivered to CalCPA members

California CPA, Jan-Feb, 2008

At the heart of California's world-class economy are multitudes of talented business and finance professionals. And over the past several years, the demands from regulators, shareholders and employers to keep the businesses these professionals serve thriving and transparent have been unprecedented.

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CPA Sarah Gatenby, a controller at Santa Clara University, says the recent deluge of pronouncements and auditing standards makes her feel like she's back in public accounting.

"Our auditors used to alert us to new standards and reporting requirements, but now there's much more pressure for us to do that ourselves and stay current," she says.

Enter CalCPA's Financial Leadership Forum.

"CPAs in industry need to stay current," says Patricia Cochran, CFO for Vision Service Plan in Rancho Cordova and president of the California CPA Education Foundation board of trustees. "For the past two years, CalCPA and the Education Foundation have been talking to business and industry CPAs to better understand their needs and develop a program to meet those needs. The Financial Leadership Forum is that program."

The Financial Leadership Forum is a special CalCPA membership group developed to enhance the support provided to CPAs and non-CPAs in the business community through tailored programs and resources that better meet their professional needs.

The Forum's key tenets are a commitment to ethical responsibility, excellence, strategic innovation and best practices in financial and business management. Additionally, the Forum supports financial leaders and executives through powerful advocacy, thought leadership, executive education and essential resources.

"We're interested in many areas a CPA in public practice wouldn't be," says Laura Weisshar, controller for Kaiser Permanente in Pasadena. "The Forum presents an excellent opportunity for CPAs, who aren't practicing public accounting, to have the issues they want addressed and discussed."

BUILDING PRESSURE

Through surveys and interviews, California business and industry CPAs sounded off about issues that affect their businesses daily, including internal controls, leadership, mergers and acquisitions, growth and profit, cost analysis, capital investments and ethics. But that is only the tip of the iceberg.

"B & I CPAs have an ongoing commitment to being a business partner, which goes beyond just keeping the books," says Cochran. "We really get into strategy and risk assessment, as well as being another set of eyes and ears to help move the business forward."

Weisshar adds, "You have to be engaged with operational personnel about financial implications from borrowings to financial reporting that, quite frankly, as managers, they may not be familiar with."

Or, notes Gatenby, "In higher education we're confronted with financial aid issues, and loan program concerns. There's also the pressure of disclosure and dealing with the IRS Form 990T-as well as a push at the moment to have good fraud detection programs."

For some, the addition of rules and regulations-like SOX-has completely changed the ballgame they thought they were getting into. Alexander Georgiev, controller at CBS Studio Center, says he entered the profession because he really liked accounting and working in the corporate environment. He thinks SOX has changed that atmosphere for the worse.

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"You have to wear the compliance hat more; whereas, before, you did some of that, but it wasn't consuming. Now I'm concerned with going to jail, and that's taken the fun out of the profession in my opinion."

The differences in the workload SOX creates for public versus business and industry CPAs is clear.

"A public CPA is interested in evaluating how a company has responded to SOX and whether the controls are adequate," says Weisshar. "But a controller in my position first has to wrestle with identifying where we're lacking controls, implement the controls and then we have to monitor them to ensure they're working-we're more interested in the operational side, while a public CPA is more interested in the testing side."

It's all part of mounting pressures that include constantly changing demands being placed on business and finance professionals, and where it will stop seems unclear as the financial environment continues to change thanks to contributing factors such as international accounting standards and the general state of the economy.

"The competitive market place requires us to be more savvy and outwardly focused," says Georgiev. "In the past, we knew that doing our internal operations well would help our business succeed. Today, you're competing with everybody on a much bigger scale."

Moreover-as cliche as it sounds-these growing demands of the profession have made it hard for Georgiev to find good help. "The pool of people we choose from is getting smaller and it's getting harder to fill low-level positions," he says. "Before, we'd throw an ad in the paper that would say 'CBS,' and people jumped on it, which left us with real good choices. I had to pay recruiters for my last two AP clerks, which are basic, entry-level positions."