Golden Takes the Reins-and Issues-in Hand

NYSSCPA President Emphasizes Improving Profession's Image

By Simon Eskow

Jo Ann Golden was a natural advocate long before she took the podium to make her first speech as president of the New York State Society of CPAs at its annual meeting in May.

Golden, even before she became a CPA, was the first executive director for the Oneida County Youth Organization, the regional children's services organization where she worked for 12 years.

"We would do research and studies to develop…our positions and present these to (state and federal) agencies, and to the government so we could make a case for specific needs in the community," Golden said. The Utica, N.Y.-based organization pushed to bring daycare, counseling for runaway teens and other services to the region, Golden said.

"I really enjoyed the work because…it was a small agency; I had to do a little bit of everything," she said. This included balancing the agency's books, for which she began taking accounting courses in a local college, the seed that germinated into her career as a CPA several years later.

Golden maintained her advocate's spirit right into her ascendancy, and she attributes her 10-year rise from member to president to a "squeaky wheel gets the grease" quality often found in those who fight for a cause. Golden's May inaugural speech made it clear that her first priority would be advocacy, a term she places in a wide context. Golden's advocacy is an individual and a collective effort to improve the profession-from supporting accounting reform legislation in Albany to educating the public about what exactly it means to be a CPA.

"We need to look at our relationship to the people that CPAs serve," Golden said. "It's not only advocacy but it's public affairs."

Capital Ideas

Golden steps into the presidency at the tail end of hurricane Enron; the storm may have passed but there's still cleaning up to do. As of this writing, legislation continues to bubble that would change the relationship between auditors and clients. Golden, along with former president Nancy Newman-Limata and other Society members, stayed the course through the last six months to educate politicians on what the CPA stands for. The fate of pending bills aside, Enron and its aftermath will continue to inform her presidency, Golden said.

"The crisis proportion of this is finished, but the overriding ethics behind it and the problems that are still there are going to continue to come to the surface," Golden said.

Responding to Enron, Adelphia and the slew of reporting fiascoes that have surfaced recently has put the onus on CPAs to educate not just lawmakers but also the public in general, who don't really understand what the CPA actually does. Golden sees the CPA standing out as an exemplar of ethical professional behavior in a time when corporate culture has become somewhat loose in its quest for the bottom line-an ominous development that took shape in the 1980s.

"Maybe the free market sort of became a free-for-all," Golden said. "There was almost a permission that was given as this free market in the economy was created: the bottom line was critical…to get there, behavior changed. That's pretty serious. In the accounting profession we really feel that the behavior of the accounting profession is still right up there. We still put ethics before all of those other things."

The public may not be aware of this because the role of the accountant is often too technical for the average person to digest, or because a non-accounting press predigests the CPA mission for them. Individually, CPAs can demonstrate to their local communities the underlying ethical standards-not to mention the CPA's broad knowledge base-to serve as a truer testimony to the world, Golden noted.

"Becoming more visible in the community is good," Golden said. "We have a lot of knowledge we can impart to people. If everyone got involved in a community board, or some advisory committee or a governmental agency, what an impact we can make. We have the mindset and understanding of operations, finance, organizational structure; as auditors we need to understand that. We have such broad bases of knowledge, particularly small practitioners; we can bring a lot to the table. In doing that, people have a view of the profession as someone they can turn to. I would encourage people to do that."

The government's response to the recent accounting crisis has put a greater onus on CPAs to put forth the image that theirs is a trusted profession. Consequently, Golden said she wants to continue developing good relations with the New York State Education Department-particularly the Board for Public Accountancy, which oversees the profession. She also wants to get the word out to members about what new legislation will mean to them in their practice, which in turn will help them put forth a positive image to the public.

"We have been a quiet profession until of late," Golden said. "We need to be out there reminding the public that we have an incredible duty, particularly in the audit area. We need to develop a plan at the (NYSSCPA) Board of Directors level and at the leadership level and get that message out to the public and to the membership. It's part of what we're going to be talking about at the leadership conference in July."

Golden hopes to see a lot come out of the annual leadership conference being held in mid-July, including discussion on goals already established by the Board of Directors-including chapters, committees, education, and what she calls public affairs-which came out of the Strategic Planning Task Force established under Golden's predecessor, Newman-Limata.

Golden also hopes to increase outreach to students to boost recruitment, provide more technical support for the membership and, in general, promote the profession. She said she wants to work in consort with the American Institute of CPAs, because, as she says, even if the two organizations disagree with each other on some issues, they generally are working toward the same goal.

Three Lives

Golden came late to the profession, after enjoying at least two other careers.

She was born in Brooklyn and moved to Utica when she was an infant, where her father became a public accountant. Golden took quickly to mathematics as a child and went on to become a teacher in a time when professional options were limited for women. She remembers the influence her father's practice had on her at a young age.

"I remember being fascinated by the machines, and he would come home and give me checks to sort," she said. "I always had this fascination with what he was doing."

She earned degrees in mathematics and secondary education from the State University of New York at New Paltz, and taught junior high school for three years before taking time off to begin a family with her husband Larry Golden, an attorney. They have two children: Rebecca, a special education teacher for children in the state juvenile justice system, and Josh, a human resources consultant living in Atlanta, Ga., and one grandchild, Rebecca's son, Tynan.

She began her second career at the Oneida County Youth Organization instead of the classroom. For 12 years she conducted research, wrote grant applications and lobbied for a diverse set of services for children in the Utica area.

After taking some accounting classes, she returned to school and graduated from Utica College with an accounting degree in 1987.

"There's something to be said about entering a profession later in life," Golden said. "You're much more realistic about what you can accomplish. While I was doing this, I worked for a small firm, then a sole practitioner, then opened up my own office."

Her practice became an extension of her father's, though they weren't in the exact same profession-he was a public accountant, she was now a CPA. Many of her clients, however, were clients of her father's; others were the children and grandchildren of her father's clients. But, Golden said, accounting was becoming more complex: a CPA needed more resources because the work was more complex. By 2000, Golden merged with Dermody, Burke and Brown, one of the larger, locally owned firms in the area.

High-Wire Act

Golden reflected on her years coming out of accounting school as being busy. She still was raising her children, working and studying. Stepping into office sounds every bit as challenging.

"My garden needs attention, my house needs cleaning," Golden joked. "It's been incredibly difficult balancing everything. And I'm still involved in the community, so I'm very busy every minute of the day."

Golden said she is grateful for the support that her firm has given her, and for the hard work of the NYSSCPA Board of Directors that has eased the job somewhat.

The board will play a more pivotal role in Society leadership, she said, picking up on initiatives begun under the prior administration. The role of the vice president will expand, she said, to include public affairs. Board members will be asked to serve on subcommittees that will be both administrative- and issue-oriented. Task forces and action committees will be created as the need arises, Golden said, and much of that may depend on what happens at the leadership meeting.