Inside AICPA

Institute names Sells award winners...
AICPA and State Societies create new venture

German, Austrians Get Top Exam Honors

Werner Ellmauer of Munich, Germany, won the Elijah Watt Sells gold medal by earning the highest overall score on the November 2000 Uniform CPA Examination, conducted by the AICPA. A total of 62,000 candidates took the exam.

Ellmauer, who graduated from Johannes Kepler University with a master’s degree in social and economic sciences, works in the audit practice division of PricewaterhouseCoopers in Munich.

Andreas Poelzelbauer and Erich Ploechl, both of Vienna, Austria, won the silver and bronze awards for taking second and third place, respectively.

Poelzelbauer, who has a master’s in business administration from the University of Economics and Business Administration in Vienna, works as a senior manager at Moore Stephens City Treuhand GMBH. Ploechl, who graduated with a master’s degree from the Vienna University of Economics, is an audit manager with Ernst & Young, Vienna.

The Sells award, created in 1923, recognizes the contributions to the accounting profession made by Elijah Watt Sells, a founding partner of Haskins & Sells (a predecessor to Deloitte & Touche). Sells, who was one of the first CPAs licensed under a New York state law enacted in 1896, was active in the establishment of the AICPA.

The two-day CPA exam, which has four sections, is given every May and November.

Institute, State Societies Form LLC

The AICPA and the State Society Network Inc. (SSNI), which comprises the societies in the 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, have jointly established the Shared Services Limited Liability Corporation (SSLLC).

The new venture’s initial objective is to develop a national membership database, which will be licensed to the portal, cpa2biz. The portal will serve as a marketing arm of the joint venture, distributing AICPA- and state-society-branded products and services. Later, the SSLLC will focus on helping the Institute and the state societies reduce aggregate operating costs and obtain savings on volume purchases.

Currently, the Institute and the state societies have their individual areas of interest and membership classifications (for example, public practice/industry or small firm/large firm). The SSLLC plans to standardize all data elements into a uniform classification system that will provide maximum value to the user.