Letter from the President & CEO: Accounting vs. Accountability
July 25, 2007
James A. Kaitz

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From the July/Aug 2007 issue of Exchange magazine

Dear AFP Members:

With the looming retirement of the baby boomers, spiraling health care costs, plummeting savings rates, and increasing reliance on foreign lenders, the U.S. is facing unprecedented fiscal risks.

At the 2007 AFP Annual Conference in Boston, David Walker will speak candidly on whether America is heading towards "bankruptcy" and what we can do to become fiscally responsible again. Mr. Walker is the nation's chief accountability officer and head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

In recent speeches, Walker has emphasized that oversight is a key constitutional responsibility of the U.S. Congress. At AFP, we believe oversight is the responsibility of every financial professional.

If you notice, Walker doesn't call himself an accounting officer, but an accountability officer. There is a big difference. Accountability implies that you are responsible to other people for the consequences of your actions.

This issue of Exchange, our "corporate governance" issue, is also focused on accountability. In CFOs and Value Creation, KPMG shows how insights from leading finance functions can help CFOs refocus on business strategy, especially by building strong regulator and investor relations based on trust. The best CFOs are able to provide better quality information to external parties and are beginning to look at how to give investors forward-looking economic measures of value.

John Rieger, our director of financial accounting and reporting, discusses accounting standards for non-public companies as well as some changes in lease accounting standards that are being proposed by the FASB. John was recently interviewed on "SOX TV" about changes to Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404, and you can watch this video clip through the AFP Web site.

Since personal accountability is also important, we are publishing Winning with E-Mail about getting control of your deluge of messages so that you can lead your staff, stay out of trouble, and move your business forward. Believe it or not, one of the great American message writers we suggest as a model of both execution and accountability is none other than Ulysses S. Grant, whose portrait appears on the $50 bill.

If you think about it, oversight is not just about identifying mistakes.Oversight also means highlighting what is working well, identifying best practices, and making those practices known so that they can be widely implemented. AFP seeks to do this through peer-to-peer discussion lists, roundtables, networking events and, of course, through the AFP Annual Conference.

See you in Boston!

-- James A. Kaitz

PS. Please take a moment to complete this three-minute survey about the need for expressing dissenting opinions in finance. Survey: Who's Afraid of Ideas in Finance?

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