Title: Partner Company: Hutchinson & Bloodgood City: Glendale Specializations: International taxation, tax credits and incentives and financial reporting. As head of Hutchinson & Bloodgood’s Legal Service Group, Jenny Chen has knowledge of the accounting involved in law firms and frequently speaks to attorney groups. She joined the firm in 2003 and became a partner in 2007. Question: Why accounting? Answer: When I was in the third grade, my mom didn’t have time to run to the bank to get cash and asked me if she could borrow money from my piggy bank. Of course, I agreed, and went to my room to get her the money and returned with the cash and a written promissory note for her to sign. The promissory note included an interest rate and repayment terms. This is just one of many instances where my mom noticed that I had great attention to details and a knack for managing finances. When it came time to select my major for college, my mom recommended that I consider the accounting profession, which would allow me to apply all my financial skills plus give me the opportunity to interact with people from variety of industries. Favorite part of the job: Learning about different industries and getting to know the ins and outs of a business. The most rewarding part of the job, in addition, is when I partner with entrepreneurs to help them realize their dream of building their business or getting them through tough times. As an example, when a manufacturing client of mine suffered losses in consecutive years during an economic downturn, we met and discussed the challenges they faced. We brainstormed at the meeting and ended up with multi-pronged recommendations. Within a one-year period, the client’s business completely turned around and they are now doing better than ever. Biggest challenge: To transition from a service provider focused primarily on compliance work to a business consultant. In accounting, over the course of your career, the nature of the work changes dramatically from performing detail work to providing recommendations to help clients with their business operations. Most memorable experience: When I was a staff auditor, the firm that I worked for at the time was brought in for a high-profile audit, in which the predecessor auditor had notified (a government agency) that one of the company’s managers had committed fraud. The government agency launched an investigation. We performed the audit sitting in a district attorney’s office, next to an armed police officer, who was watching our every move. Everything was meticulously documented. Through this experience, I learned a few ways that one can identify fraud and the importance of always maintaining professional skepticism. How does your personality make you good at accounting? I’m a good listener and am able to empathize with my clients’ circumstances. How has your gender affected your career? Being a woman and a mom to a toddler, I have a great understanding and appreciation for the sacrifices and challenges that other professional women face at work and at home. The number of women in leadership positions and working as entrepreneurs continues to increase, and as I engage with these women, I find that my experience as a woman professional often allows me to relate and connect with a great deal of credibility. Just over half of our firm are women and most of our professional staff are women. Impact of tax reform: Many clients wonder whether changing their business structure will be more advantageous under the provisions of the tax reform. My advice to them is to not make rash decisions since we are still waiting for guidance from the Internal Revenue Service. Biggest challenge for clients: I work with mostly privately held family-owned businesses and the legal industry. Across all industries, succession planning is one of the biggest challenge for my clients for the next five to 10 years as baby boomers are set to retire. How is the accounting industry changing? The amount of compliance work, currently the bread and butter of public accounting, is likely to be reduced with the deployment of artificial intelligence technology. AI can process large amount of data in a short amount of time and will create significant disruption to the accounting profession. Accounting professionals will need to obtain new skills to work with AI and shift their focus from performing compliance work to providing business advisory and consulting services. Changes you would like to see: It would be nice to move from billing based on time spent to billing based on value add. By providing fixed prices based on the service rendered, it provides client with budgeting and price certainty. It also shifts accountant’s focus from time tracking to become a better business advisor. Advice to executives looking for an accounting firm: I am proud to be a CPA, but I have to admit, a CPA designation does not necessarily mean that the person will provide high-quality service. Entrusting your financial information and well-being to an outside professional is a very important decision that should not be made lightly. Also, fees should not be the main consideration. The level and quality of service that you will receive should be a more important factor. Advice to people considering a career in accounting: Do not limit yourself to consider only the Big 4 or national CPA firms. There are valuable and rewarding opportunities provided by regional firms, where you could become more well-rounded as a business advisor rather than being pigeon-holed.
