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The New Controllership By Steve Ernst, CPA  Over the years I have attended a number of AICPA conferences for financial and accounting executives in business and industry. Because the AICPA's membership (and the CPA population as a whole) has become almost evenly split between CPAs in public practice and those in business, industry and academia, it made sense to give additional focus to the CPE, updating and general educational needs of the CPAs in business and industry.
Now and then The Spring Controllers' Workshop was recently held in San Antonio and SAP was again very pleased to be one of the sponsoring organizations. The conclusions I drew as a result of my attendance were the culmination of a couple of years of observations, and I wanted to share those with you. Historically, these events have been much more detail-oriented, with a lot of cookbook theories, FASB updates, prescriptive thinking, transaction-based examples, tax return preparation minutiae, and some SEC matters thrown in for the executives attending from publicly held organizations. Things have changed. Sure, there still are some very valuable and well-attended sessions on recent FASB and EITF matters and legal and tax updates, as well as timely presentations on the convergence of the FASB and IASB. But, as has been the case for the last few years, there were more sessions focused on strategic matters in today's corporate atmosphere and they were presented so that the size of the organization from which the attending CFOs and controllers came didn't matter. These topics covered such areas as facing challenging situations and ethical conduct within a financial function; corporate social responsibility; developing a team that consistently performs at a high level; audit committee effectiveness; internal control guidance for the smaller company; and the new challenges of corporate governance. If anything, this transformation indicates the movement of the controllership function into a more strategic position within a company and how, in a number of small and midsize companies, the need to centralize or aggregate the CFO and controller positions and responsibilities has required that the executive holding this position be better prepared to manage the execution of a strategic financial plan as well as maintain a system of financial and operational controls. Another indication of how the controllership function has matured was the intense level of attention the participants paid to these presentations and the discussion after the presentation on the topics covered. Of all the AICPA and state society events I've attended, those attending the AICPA's Controllers' Workshops have always impressed me with their focus on content and quality of the Q&A portion of each session. Confluence of subject matter Although each session of the recent Controllers' Workshop stood on its own in terms of content and presentation, there did appear to be a natural confluence of thought reflecting what's been happening in the world of corporate finance and accounting over the last five years. The impact of Sarbanes-Oxley continues to be the buzz. The SOX discussions, bracketed by topics covering the COSO internal control guidelines for smaller businesses and the need to think about corporate governance very early in a company's life cycle, were examples of where the discussions among the attendees tended to go. When you combine the above with the examples given in the discussion of situational ethics, you had a great basis for discussing the current trend of restatements and what was driving that trend. Although most companies represented were not covered by SAB 99. Are we changing? Is what I perceived at the Controllers' Workshop an actual change in the way controllers are being viewed and the way they view themselves and their responsibilities, or is it a reflection of the times and the pressures all financial executives feel when pursuing corporate and personal goals and trying to maintain a high level of ethical conduct in an ever expanding world with a myriad of rules, regulations and changing economic environments? I believe it's a combination of both. Today, there is a change in the way private business founders and owners and the way public company boards of directors and audit committees view the role of the controller and the role that position plays in the corporate hierarchy. There is more expected from the controllership function, both professionally and personally, and the bar being higher is reflected in the way controllers look to continually keep themselves updated and prepared to meet those expectations. |
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