CONFERENCE CALL: CPAS ASK MILLIONS FOR TV AD PUSH

A trade organization for accountants is hoping to raise $10 million for a five-year television advertising campaign that would tout CPAs as financial planners .

The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants is hoping to attract $2 million a year for five years in an effort to gain more recognition for members who have earned the organization’s personal financial specialist certification, which requires CPAs to take courses on investments and other facets of financial planning.

The trade group is soliciting contributions from financial services firms, such as mutual fund companies, to help it pay for a campaign on public television stations across the country, according to Phyllis Bernstein, the New York-based group’s director of personal financial planning.

Such a move could prove controversial, as other trade organizations such as the National Association of Personal Financial Advisers, have been criticized for taking money from vendors of products members recommend (InvestmentNews, Dec. 1, 1997). And CPAs pride themselves on their objectivity.

“It (the ad campaign) won’t change the way they determine what they recommend,” Ms. Bernstein insists.

She says the trade group won’t endorse any fund firms, and therefore its members won’t feel obliged to recommend those products.

How to get respect

Accountants are scrambling to get public recognition of the fledgling personal financial specialist certification. The advertising campaign comes as more and more accountants get into financial planning, but also as other designations for financial planning have already achieved a level of legitimacy, such as the certified financial planner mark.

The campaign really began in December when the AICPA spent $100,000 to sponsor financial planner Jonathan Pond’s Financial Freedom, a weekly public television show. The sponsorship allows the AICPA to advertise a toll-free number for investors to call and find an accountant with the Personal Financial Specialist certification.

Accountants
are getting into the business rapidly. The trade group boasts 250 accountants with the degree, while only about 100 earned it last year. Indeed at last week’s AICPA Personal Financial Planning Technical Conference in Orlando, sessions were packed, and one about the new Roth Individual Retirement Account was standing room only.

The fine art of planning

Those attending got a splash of cold water from Louis Harvey, president of Dalbar Inc., a Boston-based firm that researches mutual fund and insurance company sales performance, and has also begun tracking the performance of financial advisers. Mr. Harvey painted a picture of investors whose lust for top performance in their portfolios has them doing their own research, and trading more and more on their own over the Internet. The key will be convincing investors they ought to pay for a service they often think they can do themselves.

“That is one of the challenges for the folks in the accounting profession as you move from a science to an art,” Mr. Harvey said.