Saint Paul Chapter (No. 130)

FEATURE ARTICLES

Corporate governance reforms, an increasingly global business environment and rapidly changing technologies have fueled the need for finance professionals with specific technical accounting skills and a high degree of business acumen.  These factors also have heightened demand for individuals who have demonstrated their expertise and commitment to ongoing education by earning professional designations. By obtaining advanced certifications, individuals can gain the skills and experience needed to help their organizations capitalize on changes and trends affecting the industry -- and enhance their career prospects in the process.

Earning professional designations can provide numerous benefits, including improved marketability and earning power.  In a Robert Half International survey of CFOs, a large majority said earning a certification is valuable for an accounting professional’s career advancement.  In addition, the 2006 Salary Guide from Robert Half International cites that possessing an industry-recognized credential can raise a job candidate’s starting salary by as much as 10 percent.

Certain credentials have become particularly desirable since the passage of recent accounting reforms.  These designations include the certified management accountant (CMA) and the certified financial manager (CFM), both offered by the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA).  A master’s in business administration (MBA) also can be valuable for those aspiring to leadership positions.

Certification requirements are continually changing.  Credential seekers should verify these, along with exam and application costs, with the sponsoring organization before making a decision to pursue an accreditation.  Bear in mind that continuing education is almost always necessary to maintain credentials, and fees may sometimes be charged to renew designations.

The need for ongoing professional development cannot be overemphasized as a means of increasing your experience and maximizing your potential in the accounting field.  Whether you’re looking for an immediate promotion or want to prepare yourself for future opportunities, obtaining an industry-recognized certification can give you the edge you need to move your career forward.

Accountemps is the world's first and largest temporary staffing service specializing in the placement of accounting, finance and bookkeeping professionals.  The company has more than 330 offices throughout North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and offers online job search services at www.accountemps.com.  For more information, call the St.
Paul office at (651) 293-3973.

Submitted by Accountemps

The climb up the corporate ladder for accounting professionals may be a little easier these days, according to a recent survey by Accountemps. Sixty percent of executives polled said companies are more likely to promote from within today than they were three years ago. To ensure your company retains the talent it needs to succeed, internal recruiting – should be an integral component of your hiring strategy.

Knowing you have a policy of hiring from within the organization encourages employees to take greater ownership of their work. This will result in enhanced morale and productivity, as workers will be more motivated when they see that their employers value loyalty and reward outstanding performance. You’ll also demonstrate that you’re interested in helping them advance in their careers and gain new skills and experience.

The first step in setting up a successful internal hiring program is to develop an effective method for spreading the word about job openings. Corporate intranets are an efficient way to communicate opportunities. You also can post notices on bulletin boards in break rooms or publish them in employee newsletters. The key is ensuring that everyone knows where to find the information.

You’ll also need to develop job descriptions that include all pertinent information: the responsibilities and objectives of the position along with the required experience, skills, degrees and certifications. Include detailed hiring criteria in the profile, as it will help attract strong candidates and discourage the unqualified. Also, establish standard procedures for how employees should apply for openings. Most importantly, set up a consistent process that works for your firm and gives all personnel equal access.

Accountemps is the world’s first and largest temporary staffing service specializing in the placement of accounting, finance and bookkeeping professionals. The company has more than 330 offices throughout North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and offers online job search services at www.accountemps.com. For more information, call 1-800-803-8367.

Fall 2003 Issue of Business Ethics

By Marjorie Kelly

In the wake of recent ethics scandals, one might imagine that business schools would be deepening their attention to business ethics. But at many schools the reverse is happening. A slow, drip-by-drip erosion of business ethics teaching has been going on in MBA programs throughout the 1990s--and it seems to be getting worse today.

A case in point is the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh, which has dropped a required ethics course from its full-time MBA program beginning next year. William Frederick, professor emeritus at the Katz School and past president of the Society for Business Ethics, said via e-mail that the ethics course "has been under pressure for either elimination or downsizing almost from its inception in the early 1960s." He pointed out it was reduced from five to three credits in the 1980s, then cut again to one-and-a-half credits in the 1990s. When Donna Wood, one of the school’s three ethics professors, resigned from Katz this year, "it opened the way for a push by faculty and the dean to wipe [the required course] out entirely, which has now been accomplished," Frederick said.

The University of Pittsburgh is not alone in its downgrading of ethics. At Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Va., a required business ethics course was dropped from the MBA curriculum within the last two years. The State University of New York at Albany dropped the business ethics requirement from its MBA a number of years ago, and now doesn’t even offer it as an elective, said associate professor Paul Miesing. At Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisc., a social issues in management course required of MBA students was downgraded from three to one-and-a-half credits, and students can opt to skip it entirely and take a law course instead.

Villanova University in Villanova, Pa., years ago had a three-credit required MBA course in business ethics, but now requires one-and-a-half credits -- through a class combined with marketing management, reports senior associate dean Mohammad Najdawi. Similarly, at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia in Athens, Ga., business ethics merits a one-and-a-half credit course -- combined with negotiations. "What’s the message?" professor Archie Carroll said via e-mail. "That all ethics are negotiable?" In addition, Carroll said, the ethics class is taught by a marketing professor.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the business school has lost a series of business ethics faculty since 1997 and no longer has an occupant for its endowed chair in that area. Today its business ethics class is taught by a professor trained in transportation economics.

The effects of the lack of ethics training showed up at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Md. this year, reported Tim Edlund, when the Maryland Certified Public Accountants examining board challenged May’s accounting graduates as unqualified to sit for the exam, since none of their required courses emphasized ethics. While the board relented in that case, for this coming May, Edlund said, "they will require our business and society course for CPA candidates, or some other suitable course."

Author Amitai Etzioni wrote recently that business schools deserve an F for treatment of business ethics, Carroll noted. "I might give them a C, but not much better," he added. "I think the faculty who are teaching business ethics are doing a fine job, for the most part, but the business schools, overall, are not handling the topic effectively."

Of course not all is bleak. The Katz School itself still requires business ethics coursework for undergraduates, as well as for both part-time and executive MBAs, simply not for full-time MBAs, reported associate professor Brad Agle. "Ethics is not dead at the Katz School," he emphasized. The school has the new David Berg Center for Ethics and Leadership, with a substantial endowment. And the school is creating a certificate program (like a minor) in ethics and leadership for undergraduate business students. The school also has one of the largest doctoral programs in business ethics and business and society.

As for Donna Wood -- who left Katz -- she now holds the David W. Wilson Chair in Business Ethics at the University of Northern Iowa, where she reported finding broad-based support for ethics. One of her first acts was to create a November conference entitled "Enron and Beyond: a Crisis of Capitalism." "My deans have said they consider it a professional obligation to speak up about the current crisis," she commented.

Ethics is likewise getting stronger at Duquesne University’s John F. Donahue Graduate School of Business in Pittsburgh, which this year added a required applied ethics course for MBAs. And starting this fall, the business school has teamed up with the School of Leadership and Professional Advancement to offer a two-year Masters of Science of Leadership in Business Ethics, reported James Weber, director of the Beard Center for Leadership in Ethics at Duquesne. More news of progress comes from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which just hired ethics professor Lindsay Thompson to "evaluate and revamp the business ethics curriculum," she reported.
In addition, William Frederick noted that there is a bright spot for ethics at the nation’s Catholic--particularly Jesuit--business schools, most of which require ethics or business and society courses. Schools he pointed to as examples included Santa Clara University, Boston College, Loyola of Chicago, DePaul University, Fairfield University, Notre Dame, and Georgetown.

It would be simplistic to say business ethics is missing from business schools. But its emphasis is uneven, and at too many schools it is diminishing. A primary reason, wrote Carroll, is that "faculty don’t want to allow ‘shelf space’ in the curriculum for business ethics, because they want their own courses there." There is room for only so many required courses. "To add ethics, what will be deleted?" he said. "Second, the faculty simply don’t understand or appreciate the subject matter."

Wood added that at most schools, business and society or business ethics classes exist only because of the accreditation standards of the 1970s and 1980s issued by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), based in St. Louis. In the 1970s, those standards "effectively required some form of course in business and society or social issues in management," said Duane Windsor of Rice University in Houston, Tex. But in the 1990s the AACSB adopted a more flexible approach.

One person who helped rewrite those standards for the 1990s was Thomas Bausch, professor and former dean at Marquette University, who is a former president of AACSB. He said the aim then was to view business in the context of society, while building in flexibility for schools on how to integrate social issues into coursework. "But the net result over time -- driven by the financial theory of the firm and careerism at its worst -- has been a downward spiral in the quality of education," he wrote via e-mail, "with more quantitative stuff, and far less emphasis on business being an institution of society whose final end is to serve the common good."

Without a clear AACSB mandate requiring a course in business ethics, schools began finding their ethics requirement squeezed. "There are certain schools, such as Rice University in Houston, Tex., where this deterioration has not yet occurred," wrote Windsor in an open letter to the AACSB. "But I believe the phenomenon to be sufficiently widespread to be alarming." The problem, he continued, is that ethics faculty lack the strength of numbers to outvote other areas, like economics or accounting, so they generally cannot influence curricular decisions. When push comes to shove, ethics can be shoved out of the curriculum.

Today AACSB standards are being re-written again, with a third draft now circulating for comment, to be voted on in April 2003. "AACSB ought to make business and society coursework mandatory," Windsor wrote. But the current draft fails to do so. Milton Blood of the AACSB said via e-mail that the draft does require that "the topic of ethics be included in curricula," but that "we do not tell schools how to structure instruction into courses." Some schools prefer to include ethics in other courses, rather than as a stand-alone course, he explained.

While plausible in theory, this approach in practice has generally proven ineffective. Villanova, for example, tried injecting ethics into every course. "It did not work," said professor Najdawi. "The ethics professor came as a guest lecturer and wasn’t taken seriously. Also, how do you test on it?" In the 1990s Villanova switched to its current half class of ethics instead.

Frederick said other business schools--like Duquesne--tried ethics-across- the-curriculum but similarly found it didn’t work, because "most faculty are not knowledgeable about ethics." Added Diane Swanson, associate professor of management at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan.: "It would be like requiring all faculty to teach some neoclassical economic theory."

Windsor noted that the AACSB said its current draft moved ethics up the implicit hierarchy of content areas. But "a course mandate rather than verbiage is wanted now," he said. "Ethics is more important than flexibility." Wood concurred. "The message of today’s standards, and those proposed, is that ethics deserves verbal acknowledgment but no resource base -- i.e. it is not essential," she wrote to the AACSB.

Frederick and Swanson have issued a call to arms, organizing faculty to protest that the new standards don’t go far enough in their treatment of ethics, and seeking a formal face-to-face dialogue with the AACSB. Swanson reported mid-October that faculty letters were "streaming into the AACSB offices." She has also asked her Kansas congressional representatives in Washington to work with other government officials to create a national Task Force on Business Ethics Education.

What the two are seeking is nothing less than a "comprehensive inquiry into the role that business schools and their accrediting agency, AACSB, play in inculcating in their students a normatively amoral attitude that permits, tolerates, and at times encourages unethical, fraudulent, corrupt and illegal behavior by business practitioners," they wrote.

Swanson believes the stakes are extremely high, and the risks of neglect of ethics are evident in the behavior seen today in executive suites. As she wrote to colleagues on the list-serve of the International Association for Business and Society, there is now a unique "window of opportunity" to impact accreditation standards--otherwise coursework in ethics and social issues in management "will remain weak or non-existent in schools of business for the next decade."

Milton Blood of the AACSB can be reached at, 600 Emerson Road, Suite 300, St. Louis, MO 63141-6762; phone 314-872-8481 (Milton@aacsb.edu). Diane Swanson (swanson@ksu.edu), Assoc. Prof. of Management, Kansas State Univ., Manhattan, KS 66506; phone 785/532-4352. William Frederick (BillFred@katz.pitt.edu), Prof. Emeritus of Business Admin., Katz Graduate School of Business, Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1246 Murray Hill Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15217; phone 415/521-7752.

Being in charge of your own professional development is important at all career stages, but it requires planning and persistence. Here are a few tips to help you determine your primary objectives and make sure you stay on track toward achieving them:

* Clarify key goals. Ask yourself what is most important for you to accomplish in your professional life: financial stability, rank, peer recognition or personal satisfaction. Understanding what you want is the first step toward achieving your objectives.

* Stay focused on the big picture. Create a career plan that will help you keep an eye on your long-term aspirations. Evaluate your progress every few months to gauge if you're still on target for reaching your goals.

* Learn as you go. Each position you take should be a logical step toward reaching your objectives. Add to your expertise with every job, building the skills you'll need to face your next challenges.

* Maintain a work/life balance. You may be committed to your work and career, but it's important not to lose sight of your personal priorities. If you're unable to spend enough time with friends and family, you could set yourself up for burnout, which can prevent you from achieving your career objectives. Try to recognize when you're overloaded and find ways to better manage your time and prioritize your responsibilities.

* Expand your contacts. Make networking an ongoing activity, not just something you do when you're in search of a new position. Think of time and effort spent staying in touch with people as an investment in your career development.

* Promote yourself. Without boasting, ensure that your manager is aware of your hard work and achievements. For example, consider submitting activity reports on a regular basis. Also contribute ideas during meetings and offer to take on projects that fall outside of your job description - these efforts could serve as springboards to career advancement.

In today's modern world of business, individuals in management accounting and financial management constantly face ethical dilemmas. For example, if the accountant's immediate superior instructs the accountant to record the physical inventory at its original costs when it is obvious that the inventory has a reduced value due to obsolescence, what should the accountant do? To help make such a decision, here is a brief general discussion of ethics and the "Standards of Ethical Conduct for Members."

Ethics, in its broader sense, deals with human conduct in relation to what is morally good and bad, right and wrong. To determine whether a decision is good or bad, the decision-maker must compare his/her options with some standard of perfection. This standard of perfection is not a statement of static position but requires the decision-maker to assess the situation and the values of the parties affected by the decision. The decision-maker must then estimate the outcome of the decision and be responsible for its results. Two good questions to ask when faced with an ethical dilemma are, "Will my actions be fair and just to all parties affected?" and "Would I be pleased to have my closest friends learn of my actions?"

Individuals in management accounting and financial management have a unique set of circumstances relating to their employment. To help them assess their situation, the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) has developed the following "Standards of Ethical Conduct for Members."

STANDARDS OF ETHICAL CONDUCT FOR MEMBERS

Members of IMA have an obligation to the public, their profession, the organizations they serve, and themselves, to maintain the highest standards of ethical conduct. In recognition of this obligation, the IMA has promulgated the following standards of ethical conduct for its members. Members shall not commit acts contrary to these standards nor shall they condone the commission of such acts by others within their organizations.

Members shall abide by the more stringent code of ethical conduct, whether that is the standards widely practiced in their country or IMA's Standards of Ethical Conduct. In no case will a member conduct herself or himself by any standard that is not at least equivalent to the standards identified for members in IMA's Standards of Ethical Conduct. The standards of ethical conduct for IMA members are published in SMA 1C (Statement on Management Accounting).

COMPETENCE

Members have a responsibility to:

• Maintain an appropriate level of professional competence by ongoing development of their knowledge and skills.
• Perform their professional duties in accordance with relevant laws, regulations, and technical standards.
• Prepare complete and clear reports and recommendations after appropriate analyses of relevant and reliable information.

CONFIDENTIALITY

Members have a responsibility to:

• Refrain from disclosing confidential information acquired in the course of their work except when authorized, unless legally obligated to do so.
• Inform subordinates as appropriate regarding the confidentiality of information acquired in the course of their work and monitor their activities to assure the maintenance of that confidentiality.
• Refrain from using or appearing to use confidential information acquired in the course of their work for unethical or illegal advantage either personally or through third parties.

INTEGRITY

Members have a responsibility to:

• Avoid actual or apparent conflicts of interest and advise all appropriate parties of any potential conflict.
• Refrain from engaging in any activity that would prejudice their ability to carry out their duties ethically.
• Refuse any gift, favor, or hospitality that would influence or would appear to influence their actions.
• Refrain from either actively or passively subverting the attainment of the organization's legitimate and ethical objectives.
• Recognize and communicate professional limitations or other constraints that would preclude responsible judgment or successful performance of an activity.
• Communicate unfavorable as well as favorable information and professional judgments or opinions.
• Refrain from engaging in or supporting any activity that would discredit the profession.

OBJECTIVITY

Members have a responsibility to:

• Communicate information fairly and objectively.
• Disclose fully all-relevant information that could reasonably be expected to influence an intended user's understanding of the reports, comments, and recommendations presented.

RESOLUTION OF ETHICAL CONFLICT

In applying the standards of ethical conduct, members may encounter problems in identifying unethical behavior or in resolving an ethical conflict. When faced with significant ethical issues, members should follow the established policies of the organization bearing on the resolution of such conflict. If these policies do not resolve the ethical conflict, such members should consider the following courses of action.

• Discuss such problems with the immediate superior except when it appears that the superior is involved, in which case the problem should be presented initially to the next higher managerial level. If a satisfactory resolution cannot be achieved when the problem is initially presented, submit the issues to the next higher managerial level. If the immediate superior is the chief executive officer, or equivalent, the acceptable reviewing authority may be a group such as the audit committee, executive committee, board of directors, board of trustees, or owners. Contact with levels above the immediate superior should be initiated only with the superior's knowledge, assuming the superior is not involved. Except where legally prescribed, communication of such problems to authorities or individuals not employed or engaged by the organization is not considered appropriate.
• Clarify relevant ethical issues by confidential discussion with an objective advisor (e.g., IMA Ethics Counseling service) to obtain a better understanding of possible courses of action. - Consult your own attorney as to legal obligations and rights concerning the ethical conflict.
• If the ethical conflict still exits after exhausting all levels of internal review, there may be no other recourse on significant matters than to resign from the organization and to submit an informative memorandum to an appropriate representative of the organization. After resignation, depending on the nature of the ethical conflict, it may also be appropriate to notify other parties.

As the saying goes, "time is money." But for many employees time - or at least control of it - is happiness, too. Because many companies have made staff reductions, firms are relying on remaining employees to assume expanded responsibilities. This can mean longer hours and can, over time, lead to burnout among staff members.

As a manager, offering your team a flexible schedule can alleviate some of the burden and allow them to achieve a better work-life balance. In addition, you'll be more likely to retain top performers by enhancing job satisfaction.

• Take a personal interest. Find out what interests people outside of work so you know why your workers want more flexibility. The reasons could range from pursuing an advanced degree to spending more time with family. Understanding employees' motivation and needs will help you develop the most beneficial policies.
• Pay attention to timing. Not everyone produces the best work between 9 and 5. If possible, stagger schedules to enable early risers and night owls to work when they're most productive. As an added benefit, this may enable you to expand coverage to clients.
• Think of alternatives. If permanent flex-time arrangements are not feasible, offer your workers flexibility with their daily schedules. Finding time to run personal errands can be a challenge, particularly those tasks that can only be handled during business hours. Your full-time employees will appreciate the option to take early or late lunch hours, for instance, to address these tasks.