Written by: Bill Schneider
As I head to New York this week for the April AICPA Board meeting, I wanted to leave you with a few thoughts.
My employer, AT&T has started a new campaign we call Rethink Possible. Its an advertising campaign, but it is much more than that. We are really trying to highlight what AT&T is now and has always been – a company creating and offering cutting edge products and services. Don’t think so, what’s that ringing in your pocket, your purse or your belt? Got a Kindle reader that wireless downloads books? Connected to the internet today? Moved your business to “internet protocol communication services? These are all AT&T services that didn’t exist 5, 10 or 15 years ago. OK, cell phones existed 15 years ago, but what you have in your pocket today didn’t and it would not work without AT&T.
The campaign got me thinking about how we are creative in the controllers group. What do we do to help move the company forward. But ever since the days of – insert your favorite financial reporting disaster here, for me it would be Enron and WorldCom, for younger generations it might end up being Lehman Brothers, for older generations you have plenty to choose from – the “joke” has been that businesses want creativity in every aspect of what they do EXCEPT FOR their CPAs. The term creative accounting gives rise to images of financial defalcations, greedy company officers and complicit accountants. I think that is wrong. Creativity belongs in the financial and controllers departments as much as it belongs in the research and development department. I think we need to fight back and call “creative accounting” what it really is, fraudulent accounting, because until we do we will never be seen as a true equal to the rest of the business in moving our companies forward.
If you think about it, I bet many of you are positively creative every year, month, week and day. You have to find ways to track and get the accounting right on new business transactions. You are asked to find ways to change the old methods of doing things in order to track more transactions, more accurately with less labor. You are asked to find better, faster ways to report the results of the business so that management can make better decisions quicker.
I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. CPAs need to be creatively accruate. I would say we are creative and accurate and we should be proud of that fact, but until we start calling fraudulent accounting what it really is, we will never be free to call ourselves creative. What do you think?
I think there is a certain amount of perception from the public that will be extremely difficulty to be changed because of the inherent psychological security attached to money. However, I would really like to see this issue overcome because we do apply logic in our creativity in order to be accurate and that can be considered “art”?