COCO Considers Revitalizing Committee Service

By Jay Dismukes

Increasing requests for the New York State Society of CPAs to comment on recent and dramatic changes in the CPA profession may necessitate a closer look at the activity and makeup of the Society’s committees and their unique ability to reflect on accounting issues.
Any reshaping of committees, however, would hinge upon a more vigorous role for the NYSSCPA Committee on Committee Operations (COCO), which is responsible for their oversight and would be crucial to helping populate the committees with an appropriate number of members who have relevant backgrounds.

Executive Director Lou Grumet and other Society staff met last month with COCO members to discuss with them the growing importance of the committees and to consider ways in which the expertise and experience of committee members could be put to greater use for the profession and the public at large.

The Society is widely perceived in the political arena as having good grass-roots relations, and is getting more requests from organizations like FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board) and the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) to have access to the membership.

“We have a powerful knowledge base in our members and they have become increasingly comfortable with turning this knowledge into public policy issues,” said Grumet. “Therefore, we need to have an active group of members involved who are representative of firms of all sizes and those in industry.”

Though COCO expressed significant interest in elevating the functions of the Society’s committees and meeting the need for their active participation, most of the members raised points that they said would have to be addressed before moving forward.

Considerations that would need attention included:

• Assurance that committee activity is conducted in the public’s and the NYSSCPA membership’s interest;
• Quality control that prevents a committee from single-handedly speaking on behalf of the Society;
• An ability to act quickly and effectively when issuing public policy statements;
• An awareness on the part of committees and their chairs that they would be expected to undertake more responsibilities, perhaps even publishing a white paper when necessary (Several COCO members stated that committee enterprise is only as strong as the committee leadership.),
• Suitable identification of professional items that call for committee examination, and a mechanism for ensuring that the appropriate members are responding to outside proposals and requests.

Before any changes to the committee framework could take place, the continued use of Society task forces and their creation and purpose also need clarification, COCO said.

Feeling that task forces periodically have replaced the need for committees, some COCO members said the establishment of task forces, including their composition and objectives, should be more clearly communicated to committee members.

“We have a basic structure problem,” COCO member Richard Piluso said. “The task force should be a subgroup of the committee for one specific purpose.”

Despite their concerns, COCO members generally supported the idea of revitalizing committee service, but they also pointed out that the possibility of achieving such a goal is dependent upon young CPAs, whose willful participation in state accounting societies is necessary to ensure the continued significance and well-being of the profession.

“We need to create an environment where people take pride in serving on a committee,” COCO member George Foundotos said.