2000 Tax Education Symposium a Success

Authors:

Richard P. Weber, CPA, Ph.D.
Professor
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI

Suzanne Kopplin, CPA
Director
Ernst & Young LLP
McLean, VA

Editor's note: Dr. Weber and Ms. Kopplin were co-chairs of the AICPA Tax Education Symposium Task Force. For more information about this column, contact Dr. Weber at (517) 432-2925 or weberr@pilot.msu.edu.

This year's symposium, titled Innovations in Tax Education and Practice for the New Millennium, is among the AICPA's major commitments toward developing tomorrow's accountants.

Eighty-four participants, most of them academic tax instructors, attended the symposium. The majority came from large and small universities. Junior college faculty members were also present, as well as practicing professionals.

Plenary Session

Suzanne Kopplin of Ernst & Young and Dr. Richard Weber of Michigan State University, co-chairs of the planning committee, began the symposium by welcoming the participants. Robert Elliott, the 1999–2000 Chair of the Board of Directors of the AICPA and a partner in KPMG, kicked off the program. He illustrated how the AICPA is following its vision by exploring the implementation of a new, broader certification. Mr. Elliott contrasted past and future markets for professional services. He noted that the value of the CPA designation was initially based on the value of assurance services; without those services, the U.S. financial markets would not work. He pointed to weak financial markets in several countries where the high level of disclosure that is required in the U.S. is not present. He then discussed the expansion of the trusted adviser status of CPAs into the tax and consulting arenas.

Numerous forces are causing the business world and CPAs to change; the most powerful of these is technology. Technology allows closer relationships between businesses and their customers, enabling contact on an individual basis. It allows quality improvement, speeds the pace of business with short cycles and makes competition truly global. These changes are also infiltrating professional services. Assurance services have to move away from just providing an annual audit, to providing real-time assurance on business information. To meet the challenges, the AICPA in the U.S. and professional organizations in several other countries are exploring a broader, global business certification to provide credentials to those trusted business advisers.

Representing the AICPA Examinations Staff, Dr. Gerald Melican, assisted by Ed Gehl, discussed the CPA examination. They noted that the goals of the CPA exam are to test knowledge of important content areas, higher-level cognitive skills, broad areas of knowledge and the ability to integrate that knowledge. Content specification is being developed from a recent sampling of current practice. Currently, the exam (consisting of four sections) is given infrequently on a rigid schedule. The AICPA is working on offering the exam more frequently, matching the exam items more closely with the skills being tested and adapting the exam format to better match the skill set being tested. The idea of variable-length exams, while attractive, will probably not be implemented in the near future, because of problems with perceived fairness. The CPA examination, like the profession, is changing rapidly. To keep up with developments, visit the Website at www.aicpa.org/exams.

Dr. Cherie O'Neil (Colorado State University) presented various options for classroom management with technology. Dr. O'Neil provided an overview of the many electronic applications available and discussed their advantages and disadvantages. She covered issues arising from the management of virtual (as opposed to traditional) classrooms. Finally, she examined the more popular technology products on the market (WebCT and Blackboard), as well as the offerings of textbook publishers. She also discussed classroom management systems under development at a number of schools.

Breakout Sessions

Dr. Ronald Tidd (Michigan Technological University) discussed the use of off-the-shelf software in classroom management and operation. Among the applications covered were Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Outlook, FrontPage, Acrobat and PaperMaster. He highlighted the use of programs to collect, maintain, share, store and organize class information, and discussed the issue of the time needed to master all these tools. Dr. Tidd pointed out a number of resources that help users stay current.

Robert Abel and Eric Fletcher (BDO Seidman) discussed the current state of tax practice that today's graduates encounter. They noted that paper, while still around, has a much-diminished role in modern tax practice. Currently, Web-based versions of RIA, CCH and BNA tax services, as well as the Lexis-Nexis database, are the tools used for tax research. Other public sites, such as the IRS Digital Planet, are also regular resources. Online preparation packages can handle a wide range of tax returns. Practitioners can electronically communicate the results of research and return preparation using electronic office suites, Web browsers and related e-mail packages. Finally, practice management software is used for reporting time, collecting client billing information and monitoring due dates. In short, technology is the tool of the present and the future in tax practice.

Dr. Barbara Karlin (Golden Gate University, San Francisco) examined the electronic tax research tools from CCH, RIA, BNA, Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis, with particular attention given to the CCH and RIA products. Dr. Karlin covered the materials available from each, the functionality of each search engine and its costs. Finally, she examined how each electronic tax research tool conducts research and creates trails to support the research. Notably, while the products are available in both paper form and Web-based databases, users prefer research on the Web, because of the ease of maintenance and the fact that Web databases are always current.

Gerald Snowden and Sara Lipe (Arthur Andersen) discussed on-the-job learning. They pointed out that technology delivers essential knowledge on a timely basis, but that the system needs to incorporate flexibility to accommodate both the learner's skill level and the task at hand. Also, no matter how good the technology, human interaction must ensure that users learn the right lessons and there is a drop in ambiguity levels. The current solution to these issues is pairing coaches and trainees. The interaction between these two parties affects much of the effectiveness of on-the-job training.

Theresa Cook and Ian Ross (Ernst & Young) talked about their day-to-day experiences in tax practice. Ms. Cook provided her views from the perspective of a tax compliance professional, while Mr. Ross spoke from the viewpoint of a tax consultant. They answered many questions about the differences between tax compliance and tax consulting, what they feel they would have liked to have known before they started to work as professionals, and what skills they believe tax educators should emphasize for today's students. Their candid conversation with the participants about what they and other nonmanagement tax professionals do was well received.

Dr. Sharon Lightner (San Diego State University) discussed the trials and tribulations of distance learning. She shared her experience of conducting a class with students in four countries (Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the U.S.). Dr. Lightner pointed out the advantages of bringing diverse backgrounds and experiences to bear on the topics under study, as well as the problems of working in multiple time zones, with different cultures and with technology that did not always deliver. Despite the problems, Dr. Lightner feels that distance learning is a worthwhile exercise, even though labor intensive. Course quality and required effort can only improve as the technology supporting distance learning improves.

Harvey Fireman (Ernst & Young) spoke about managing tax knowledge in the new millennium. His presentation started with the reasons why knowledge sharing is so important in today's business environment. Mr. Fireman demonstrated several of the tools Ernst & Young uses for knowledge management, including its innovative EY/TaxLink, which is a Web-based research tool.

Dr. O'Neil expanded on her plenary session discussion with a breakout session on class management technology. The session's main focus was on commercial, Web-based teaching tools, such as WebCT and Blackboard, although some attention went to locally developed systems. WebCT and Blackboard offer a good set of course-development tools. Their main problem is the large amount of effort required to get courses up and running (because of strict formatting requirements). This is exacerbated when a school's enrollment system is not tied into the product. Despite these problems, either product or its competitors can add to classroom experience, if handled carefully.

Symposium Wrap-up

In the final plenary session, Dennis Sheriff and Emil Gulick (PricewaterhouseCoopers) discussed the implications of e-business for e-learning. Simply put, more commerce conducted electronically will increase the demand for more e-education. Specialized advanced education is the most likely to move to electronic form, because of the small audiences in any single location and the demand for "just in time" learning. The presenters' demonstrations of some of the tools currently available to e-learning practitioners were very impressive. However, they also indicated that full realization of e-learning's potential depends on increasing bandwidth.

Finally, Ms. Kopplin and Dr. Weber closed the conference, noting that the 2000 Tax Education Symposium was the last one the Tax Division would offer. In the future, the AICPA's Accounting Educators' Conference (perhaps after being renamed) will include sessions devoted to the special issues that tax education faces.