Reading the Writing on the Wall: CPA2Biz? Why?

Two years ago, when the AICPA first proposed what we now know as CPA2Biz, a for-profit web portal and distribution point for AICPA products, the NYSSCPA was among a handful of skeptics.

Our first big question was: Where is the business plan? This process is critical to any new venture, and one would expect it to explain why the AICPA was contemplating such a project at all. The semi-confidential “business overview” of the project that we received didn’t amount to a thorough business plan. The serious concerns we had about legal protections for our state society and our members were never resolved, and other major questions about the basic nature of CPA2Biz and its operations have never been answered.

Bluntly put, the portal project has been a classic case of bad planning and execution, a “big, hairy, audacious goal” (BHAG, in strategic planning vernacular) that spun out of control. The project was characterized by missed deadlines, unmet expectations, lurching tactical planning, interminably shifting negotiations with state societies, bungled communications, and chronic member frustration. Communication with AICPA members, the state societies, and the media has run the gamut from boundless optimism (long after the end of the era of irrational exuberance) to indifference to palpable defensiveness and obfuscation. Senior management at CPA2Biz has explained away the first two of what are now three substantial staff reductions by saying that they were according to plan. Most businesses avoid major staff layoffs, recognizing there are other, better ways to handle staffing during the startup phase’s ups and downs.

A certain level of defensiveness on the part of CPA2Biz’s proponents is understandable, because the skepticism, criticism, and opposition have never let up. Since its beginnings as a vehicle for offering products and services to members, and then as a funding and shared-services mechanism between the AICPA and state societies, CPA2Biz revenues have been shifted around and its organizational structure has become increasingly byzantine. In April, prolonged negotiations between CPA2Biz, the AICPA, and the state societies over a shared-services arrangement involving state societies’ membership databases came to a frustrating end. For many reasons, the NYSSCPA wasn’t involved in these discussions, not the least because we were averse to signing an agreement when our questions were not answered consistently or convincingly. We could read the writing on the wall.

Now, the Enron fallout has people relentlessly asking serious and uncomfortable questions about leadership in the accounting profession. Where CPA2Biz is concerned, we still have never fully addressed the question: Why?

Even if the portal were delivering as promised, questions would persist about why a major professional association would devote enormous time, money, and other resources to an enterprise that isn’t part of its core mission. When leaders of nonprofits stray from managing by their organization’s mission they get criticized for it, and CPA2Biz does not fit the AICPA mission.

None of the objectives listed in the AICPA’s mission statement resembles the concept of CPA2Biz. CPA2Biz fits the AICPA’s list of strategic initiatives only if one accepts the AICPA as a trade organization—a group that focuses on its members’ and its own bottom line—rather than a professional association. We are unwilling to make that leap where either the NYSSCPA or the AICPA is concerned.

An interesting question is how the AICPA’s response to the profession’s current crises would have been different if the resources that the AICPA has been giving to CPA2Biz had instead been dedicated to the mission-based objectives of standards setting, image building, and advocacy. That question is moot, but the core question is still out there, waiting for an answer: Why?

Louis Grumet
Publisher, The CPA Journal
Executive Director, NYSSCPA
lgrumet@nysscpa.org

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