Why CPAs Should Go Green and Beyond

Source: CPA Success

The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from a blog entry by Bill Sheridan.

We've heard Tom Hood's insightful take on how CFOs can build value through sustainability.

“This is a great opportunity for CFOs to consider taking a leadership role with this emerging issue,” Tom wrote recently, and he's right.

But what about CPAs in public practice? What's in it for them?

Jennifer Elder has a few ideas.

Jennifer is a CPA, an MACPA member, and president and founder of The Sustainable CFO, and she has some terrific reasons why CPAs need to be paying attention to the sustainability movement.

Hint: It goes way beyond being “green.”

Employee retention: “Generations X and Y cut their teeth on recycling,” Elder said. “Recycling and environment issues are important to them. There are a variety of studies that show an employee who believes he or she is working for a socially responsible company is 50 percent more likely to stay. When this economy turns around and jobs are available, you're going to need every reason to keep your employees.”

New services: Alert CPA firms will be able to offer a number of new services that cater to the sustainability movement. These include new reporting services because, as Elder says, “These companies are starting to report publicly. It's not mandated by the SEC yet, (but) it will be.”

A leg up on the competition: “Consumers are looking for (sustainability),” Elder says. “If there are two accounting firms you can choose from and one of them is supporting local community nonprofits, I'd go with that firm versus another one that isn't doing that.”

Bottom line: Sustainability makes good business sense, and not just for the companies that are doing it.

For the complete blog post, read “Sustainability? Try "$ustainability."

From CPA Success, the blog of the Maryland Association of CPAs, www.cpasuccess.com, September 7, 2011.