The Cfo & Cpa: How the Roles Do Change

The CFO & CPA: How the roles do change

Joshua Elliott

ACCT 495

Deidra Matthews

Throughout the duration of this class every student has learned of the ever changing responsibilities associated with the CFO position. Not only have they changed drastically, from once being a job of only number crunching, to now being a multi-faceted role in a company that is involved in financial strategy and planning as well as providing support to boards, committees and management. Most of the reforms for the CFO position took place with the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.  This act was implemented in order to protect the general public, as well as the shareholders from the fraudulent practices and accounting errors found in most enterprises, additionally the act helped to improve the accuracy of disclosures made by companies.

        The role of the CFO or Chief Financial Officer is a tricky one to describe, they literally have to be involved in a lot of areas of the company’s finances, and in doing so they have to remain level head and unbiased for board, and audit committee meetings, as well as to remain on the same page as the CEO of the company (whom of which the CFO reports directly too).

        For the three groups addressed for this discussion; boards, management , and committees, the Chief Financial Officers role, remains the same for two and changes for another. In support of the boards and committees, the Chief Financial Officer is required to provide a truthful and unemotionally involved depiction of the company’s financials. This helps to allow the boards and committees to get a real idea of how the company is doing. The reason why that process can prove hard for the CFO is because those boards are what will eventually vote on executive compensation packages and on the effectiveness of the CEO. Keep in mind that the CFO’s main responsibility is to the CEO. Management requires the CFO to emulate their corporate vision. For example, of the CEO is trying to portray the company a certain way the CFO’s job is to support the CEO and to help that person achieve that goal. A committee or a board has the goal of wanting to know the gritty truth about the company regardless of what “image” the CEO is attempting to project. In dealing with the Audit Committee the CFO and the committee look to the external audit partner for feedback regarding financial functions and as to the level of compliance within the organization.  When an internal audit if conducted the reports are often made to the CFO administratively, however, the audit committee feels that the internal audit should be accountable to the audit committee above all, which is one way the CFO provides guidance and support to the committee. The audit committee also helps the CFO; it is very common for an audit committee to be comprised of former CFO’s, in this way the audit committee helps the CFO by providing real time feedback with regards to financial functions, on performance, staffing and succession.  Another key point for the CFO while working with an audit committee, is that they want a CFO that compliments the CEO’s abilities, for example if the CEO has good financial strengths then the CFO should have good operational strengths, this is because as the nature of the CFO role changes they are becoming more alike the roles of the CEO.