Credibility Amidst the Ethical Meltdown

"World Com", "Enron" and "Arthur Andersen", "Xerox", ... the list of big name companies embroiled in horrific scandals goes on and on.

We in the accounting profession and our clients all need – and deserve – to know how so very many gild-edged, educationally pedigreed captains of industry could have been allowed to cheat and shade figures in so many corrupt ways. How could accountants have simultaneously abandoned their crucial impartiality and become handmaids to deviousness and outright fraud?

At the bottom of many expressions of client outrage is an anxiety that there is no value in working with any Certified Public Accountant. Some fear that perhaps my CPA could be leading me astray and giving me advice which could lead to business losses and economic ruin. Or, maybe my company's balance sheet will look manipulated to lenders and potential buyers and therefore my company will never get the financing it needs or the purchase price it deserves.

The pervasiveness of these concerns is a huge weight on all accountants, including those of us at Sterck Kulik O'Neill.

Top-tier brand name firms jumped into the swamp of heinous financial practices. Putative standard bearers of honesty made mincemeat of both ethics and common decency.

How can any accounting firm stand apart from the amoral and immoral slime reported on daily in the Wall Street Journal and on CNN? How do we reassure clients of our values when accountants show up lower in public opinion polls than traditionally distrusted professions? What can any CPA say with credibility?

Sterck Kulik O'Neill is a stable, mid-sized accounting firm with over thirty years experience serving individuals and small-to-medium-size companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. What we can offer for reassurance to our clients is our history, focus, and personal motivations?

We are – and have always been – interested in helping individuals and companies become financially successful. We enjoy technology and embrace change. However, we believe that businesses and financial plans must make sense. We believe that for most people and companies, wealth is built up over years by solid, traditional labor and investment activity.

We expect that we and most of our clients will enjoy a comfortable working life. We are not expecting or seeking windfall deals which will make us fabulously wealthy overnight. We expect to keep happily working... unless, of course, one of our lottery pools wins one of those $100 million jackpots. Our expectations determine how we organize our firm, how we reward our staff, and how we work for our clients. We suspect that our motivations and life view are significantly different from those responsible for creating the financial bubbles which are now exploding in public.

Sterck Kulik O’Neill separates our auditing and financial advisory activities. We do a very small number of audits, and our few audit clients do not engage us to help them make deals.

Sterck Kulik O'Neill is dedicated to the quality application of existing accounting standards and has no interest in thinking up new interpretations of traditional financial terms. We – and we believe most CPAs who are truly dedicated to accounting – do not believe that financial statements are a place for creativity. Further, to us "aggressive accounting" cannot be allowed to become a socially acceptable code word for "cheating".

We will watch with the general public as the shameful mechanisms of financial deceit are described and dismantled in the media. We will learn together “how” the public trust and accounting profession were simultaneously betrayed.

At the same time, we offer our clients our renewed commitment to helping them obtain earned financial security. We promise to hold fast to the traditional, firm impartiality always required of all Certified Public Accountants.

We want to be “Your Financial Success Advisors”. And, we will only use real numbers backed by real data when counting your success.

— Sterck Kulik O’Neill
July, 2002

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