June 2000

Board Votes to Participate in Shared Services Company

Reverses Executive Committee Action

The NYSSCPA board of directors voted on June 3 to participate in the State Societies Network Inc. (SSNI), a consortium of state societies that joined together to leverage their collective memberships to share common expenses. SSNI also is the legal entity that will form a joint venture with the AICPA, called Shared Services LLC (SSC), to help launch its Internet portal. This decision reverses an earlier Executive Committee action.

New York will be one of 51 jurisdictions participating in SSNI, launched in 1999 by the CPA Societies Executives Association (CPASEA), as a vehicle through which state societies could share costs in areas such as printing, accounting, technology, and dues collection. Each state society has paid $3 per member to join SSNI.

In addition, SSNI will have a national member database that it will lease to SSC, that in turn will release the database to CPA2Biz.com, the AICPA's Internet portal. State societies collectively will have a direct stock ownership of approximately one percent in the portal. Leasing the joint database to the portal provides the revenue to operate the SSC and therefore provide the services to the states.

The 19992000 Executive Committee voted not to participate in SSNI because of a lack of information regarding several business and legal issues.

"Additional information provided by AICPA leadership at the May AICPA Council meeting helped convince us that we should reconsider our reservations about the shared services company and the portal project," NYSSCPA President P. Gerard Sokolski said. "We had a thorough discussion at the board and decided it was time to join the rest of the state societies and the Institute in a genuine team effort."

The SSC would be empowered on behalf of the shareholders to negotiate and enter agreements with outside vendors to provide certain core services that state society shareholders would be required to use, and others that would be optional.

"The Society will have the option to select which services best benefit us and our members," NYSSCPA Executive Director Louis Grumet said. *