IN THE SPOTLIGHT
A Student Threepeat
Jeanette Maier-Lytle and her
team of talented young CPAs-to-be from the
University of Southern Indiana set a new record
in achievement by winning the state CPA
society’s Case Study Competition for the
third year in a row. The threepeat
performance—by this year’s team of
seniors May Flores, John Hayden, Adam Knepp and
junior Amy Oglesby—offered up a 63-page
report on peer review put together in just 10
days. It suggested using a peer review
certification process similar to the ISO 9000
quality standard of manufacturing companies.
Firms certified in this way could go through peer
review every five years instead of every three.
Maier-Lytle says
practicing the presentation in front of her
fellow professors and the local Kemper CPA Group
helped sharpen and prepare the team. Flores, a
second-year team member who’s already been
hired by KPMG, says her membership in
Toastmasters also gave her an edge. The students
told the JofA the experience taught them
to work as a team under strict time
pressures—a lesson that no doubt will come
in handy around tax time next year.
—Cheryl
Rosen
BUSINESS
TRENDS
Beware
the Blog
 logging can be a
risky business. Unmanaged blogs dwarf
e-mail and instant messaging (IM) in
terms of risk to companies, according to
the American Management Association
(AMA). Hazards include legal claims such
as copyright infringement, invasion of
privacy, defamation and sexual
harassment, security breaches such as
trade-secret theft and financial
disclosures, public relations disasters,
productivity drains and records
mismanagement.
However, while 76% of companies have adopted policies for e-mail usage and content and 31% have IM policies in place, only 9% control workers’ use of business blogs and just 7% govern the content employees may post on their personal blogs, according to a 2006 survey by the AMA and the ePolicy Institute.
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TOP
10
Countries for Easy Tax Filing*
1. Maldives
2. Ireland
3. Oman
4. United Arab Emirates
5. Hong Kong
6. Saudi Arabia
7. Switzerland
8. Singapore
9. St. Lucia
10. New Zealand
*Based on number of payments
and time required to file taxes and total tax
rate.
Source: Paying Taxes—The Global Picture,
World Bank and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
IN
THE SPOTLIGHT
A Peck of Jalapenos
 e’s not
quite Peter Piper, but retired CPA Richard
LeFevre picked up a $2,000 prize purse by popping
247 pickled jalapeno peppers at the Jalapeno
Eating World Championship at the Texas state
fair.
LeFevre,
who hails from Henderson, Nev., has been
competing in contests sponsored by the National
Federation of Competitive Eating since 2002. This
latest event—which he completed in eight
minutes—set a new record.
He’s
proud as a peacock, though still plainly
puckered.
—Cheryl
Rosen
BOOKMARKS
Contemporary Issues in Financial
Reporting:
A User-Oriented Approach
By Paul Rosenfield, CPA
562 pages; hardcover
Routledge; New York, N.Y.; 2006 Business Fairy
Tales: Grim Realities of
Fictitious Financial Reporting
By Cecil W. Jackson, CPA
282 pages; hardcover
Thomson; Mason, Ohio; 2006
Contemporary Issues
in Financial Reporting: A User-Oriented
Approach by Paul Rosenfield, former
director of the AICPA accounting
standards division, and Business Fairy Tales: Grim
Realities of Fictitious Financial
Reporting by Cecil W. Jackson, a
University of Southern California
accounting professor, examine ethics and
accountability in contemporary business
reporting. Using very different
approaches—the first is an
accounting history textbook, the second a
mass-market history of recent
events—both CPA authors look at
issues underlying a parade of financial
reporting scandals and offer tools for
refining critical thinking. They are
voices in the dialogue of setting things
right, and their concern is a measure of
how deeply the financial world has been
wrenched in recent years.
—Michael
Hayes
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SURVEY SAVVY
Staying Power
 oday’s workers may
change companies—or even careers—many
times, but too much job hopping still looks bad
on a resume, according to a survey of 1,400 CFOs.
Most said they took into account how long a job
candidate had spent with previous employers, and
an overwhelming majority (87%) rated loyalty as a
very or somewhat important factor in the hiring
process.
Source: Robert Half Finance
& Accounting, www.roberthalffinance.com.
SURVEY SAVVY
The Paycheck Doesn’t Lie
 merican workers are pretty
confident in their organizations’
payroll and accounting departments.
According to the American Payroll
Association’s Getting Paid in
America survey, 90.6% of employees
were certain their withholding and net
amounts were correct each payday. Plus,
85% said they trusted that their employer
adequately protected their personal
information—salary or wages, Social
Security number and bank account
numbers—from identity theft.
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NUMEROLOGY
Five
Financial Concerns of
Your Affluent Clients
Members of U.S.
households with more than $250,000 in
investable assets ranked the following as
the issues most likely to affect their
savings and investments:
1. Health care costs.
2.
Increases
in energy prices.
3.
Protecting
current wealth.
4.
Minimizing
taxes.
5.
State of
the U.S. economy.
Source: Phoenix Marketing
International, Affluent Marketing
Service, www.phoenixmi.com.
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BUSINESS TRENDS
Bringin’ Home the Bacon
 omen in management,
business and financial operations earned more
than those in any other occupational category,
with a weekly average pay of $847 in 2005,
according to the U.S. Department of Labor and the
Census Bureau.
BOOKMARKS
Stay
on Track
Managers spend an average of
seven hours a week sorting out
personality conflicts among staff
members, said a survey of 150 senior
executives in the human resources,
finance and marketing departments of the
nation’s 1,000 largest companies.
Here are some
common office troublemakers and how to
manage them:
 Blusterer.
Finds everything amusing and
is unaware that voices carry to other
cubicles. Solution: Encourage workers
to keep their voices down during
conversations or to find an empty
conference room for discussions.
Ghost.
Performs a disappearing act.
Solution: Let everyone know
how important it is to be accessible,
whether out on official business or not.
Foodie.
Distracts others with
microwave popcorn and reheated leftovers.
Solution: Remind firm
members that it is inconsiderate and
distracting to eat pungent foods at their
desks.
Pessimist.
Delights in dishing about
the hardships of the business or the
foibles of top management, especially
around new hires. Solution: Talk to this
person individually and try to stem the
negativity.
Source: Accountemps, www.accountemps.com.
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SURVEY SAVVY
Partners Pose Info Security Risk
Here’s
one to share with your business- owner clients:
Nearly 75% of responding companies said their
information security risk had increased because
of their business partners, according to a survey
of more than 200 businesses worldwide by security
consulting company Cybertrust (www.cybertrust.com). While organizations
overwhelmingly agreed with the need to monitor
their partners’ security, fewer than half
actually did so.
About a third of
respondents reported at least one security
incident involving their business partners within
the previous year. Of those organizations
reporting incidents, malicious code was the most
prevalent, with 43% of respondents reporting
infections, followed by unauthorized network
access (27%), denial of service (9%), system
abuse or misuse (8%), data theft (7%) and fraud
(6%).
ALL
IN A DAY’S WORK
Back to School
With
the youngest of her two daughters in
college, Jan Colbert, CPA, is on a new
campus herself. She’s been recruited
to Eastern Kentucky University by a
former colleague who’s a dean.
Colbert loves the technology
at Eastern Kentucky—including
computers and big screens in every
classroom that allow her to quickly
display the CPA exam or AICPA Web sites.
In her spare time, she’s been
exploring the byways on two wheels; an
avid biker, “I can do 30 miles on a
Saturday,” she tells the JofA.
Colbert’s students,
meanwhile, will benefit from her
experience as chair of the audit
committee of the CPA Exam, which reviews
the questions they will have to answer
when the time comes to get their
certification. But does she ever give
them a little clue as to what a question
will be?
“Absolutely
not—they can’t get anything out
of me that’s not public
information,” she says. “But,
of course, they still try.”
—Cheryl Rosen
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