Fall: A Time of Reflection

By Gayle M. Whittemore, CPA

I love fall. Don’t get me wrong, the other seasons certainly have their merits, but fall represents to me a time of transition: To re-engage, to review the first half of the year with an eye on planning the next one—and did I mention the happiness of shipping my kids back to school? Fall is also shaping up to be an important time for your chapter.

From a practical note, those of us who serve corporate clients know that the corporate tax deadline is Sept. 15, with October’s personal deadlines not far behind. There is also the myriad of new rules and regulations that are the compliments of the recently passed financial reform act. I have been asked by a number of people what it will mean to them, and my response is an unwavering, “It depends.”

Not in most of our lifetimes have we seen such sweeping reforms, and though not every one our members is intimately involved in accounting practices for hedge funds, unwinding CDOs or recapitalizing banks, it still will have an impact on the average American, particularly if there are meaningful changes in tax rates for our clients and ourselves.

Legal and accounting scholars are just now trying to decipher the impact of these reforms and I urge everyone to study up on the impact they will have on you and your clients. After all, when it comes to financial literacy, we are expected to be the best.

Speaking of financial literacy, this is a CalCPA program that brings truly necessary skills to high school students and our community. I am proud to report that in 2009–10, our chapter presented 10 of these programs to high school students in the Los Angeles region. Our amazing volunteers also presented nine Dollars & Sense programs to a wide array of adults, including seniors, 18-22-year-olds and other community-based organizations.

If you love to teach and have a few spare hours, please consider volunteering for our financial literacy outreach. And if you know of opportunities to present these programs in your local community—anywhere from churches to nonprofit organizations to senior centers, please let us know! We’d like to double the number of presentations in this fiscal year, as the need is great. What better way for CPAs to give back than to share the skills and expertise we already have?

Further on the community outreach front, your board has coined the idea of “CPA Cares” to describe a new way that our community can help others. We are exploring options for a day or two of community service and we welcome your ideas. Our intent is to get members, their families and friends together to do something great for the community, be it cleaning up the beach, helping paint or rejuvenating under-privileged neighborhoods. Please share your ideas; we want to kick this off before the end of fall.

Finally, all work and no networking is not an option, so we have planned a wonderful event Sept. 30 at The Lowes Santa Monica Beach Resort. In addition to spending time with each other, we will have an educational component that will provide tips on how to increase your networking skills. When we all came together in August at Elevate, we had 100-plus attendees and an absolutely wonderful time. I think the speed networking event was fun and a great success! If you haven’t been to one of our networking events, please join us and bring a friend.

For those who will be celebrating the New Year, my best wishes to you and your families.

We look forward to seeing more of you.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 27th, 2010 at 9:57 am and is filed under President's Message. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.