BUSINESS AND AGING

CPAs DISCOVER ELDERCARE SERVICES ENHANCE THEIR PRACTICE

By MARSHA VANDE BERG

Certified public accountants (CPAs) are creating their own bridge into the 21st century: By analyzing the demographics and providing services accordingly, they are seeing how offering eldercare services as an extension of small- and medium-size practices can be rewarding--at least twice over.

Eldercare services offer both financial rewards and the intrinsic pleasure of helping elderly clients (or their adult children). "Not only do the demographics say eldercare services are important, there's also a need for practitioners to diversify or specialize for their practice's long-term viability," noted Karen Stevenson Brown, an Illinois CPA who is widely known for her Elderweb site (www.elderweb.com), with its helpful links to aging-related services. "There's a window of opportunity here, but it won't last forever."

COMPETITION

George Lewis is a retired CPA in Lafayette, La., who is one of the country's leading lights when it comes to developing expertise to provide eldercare services. He chairs the ElderCare Assurance Services Task Force of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), which started meeting in 1997. Lewis maintains that by providing eldercare, practitioners can double, even triple the $7 billion they earn annually in the United States for performing traditional auditing and accounting services. Still, he observed that eldercare is not the kind of service for which "you can run an ad for and expect the elderly to come knocking."

Important for CPAs is the requisite education, personal networking and ability to quarterback a multidisciplinary team of care providers who must share the goal of offering customized services. Also critical is understanding what aging and old age mean, as well as the ability to assemble an accurate and workable inventory of community resources and services.

Eldercare services are not a market for the Big Five accounting firms, said Ann Sammon, director of the New York City­ based AICPA "An eldercare engagement will not draw an enormous fee, but it will draw a nice fee over a long time." She estimated the additional fees at $250 for 1­2 hours, to $1,000 per month, per client, depending on the kind of services offered and the kinds needed.

Like Brown, who is a colleague on the AICPA eldercare task force, Lewis sees a twofold market for eldercare service--elderly clients and their adult children. He said, however, that the "real market will come when the baby boomers start maturing."

Members of the boomer generation have begun to realize it is up to them to help provide for their parents' care. At the same time, they are beginning to see their own gray years on the horizon. Their wish list, Lewis said, is straightforward: They want the contingencies, including medical and housing expenses, covered by insurance without polices that overlap or conflict; their financial planning maintained in tip-top shape to ensure a quality life in later years; and their estate planned to provide as amply as possible for spouses and children.

Boomers and elders who seek CPA services are willing and probably able to pay the fees involved. An estimated $11 trillion to $13 trillion is controlled by those who are 65 and older. Similarly, both the middle and older groups' lives have diverged in significant ways from the aging experiences of the generations that preceded them. For example, it is no longer unusual for parents and their adult children to live hundreds of miles apart and to continue this arrangement well into their advanced years.

GROWING COMPLEXITY

"The need for eldercare services is a function of the growing complexity of society," stated Mitchell Freedman, a CPA and personal financial specialist in Sherman Oaks, Calif., who serves as the AICPA's Personal Financial Planning Committee's liaison to Lewis' eldercare task force.

The exception, says Freedman, are those cultures in which families grow up and die in the same place. Representatives of ethnic groups living on the West Coast told a Yankelovich Partners poll, conducted in December 1996 for the AICPA, that they would be less inclined to use outside sources for eldercare, for example.

Another research report, conducted for the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CA) by The Hazelton Group in 1998, also made an important distinction. When respondents were asked whether they would trust a chartered accountant (the Canadian equivalent of a CPA) generally with eldercare services, the responses were not especially positive. "We're perceived as being more interested in saving money than in providing care," Lewis explained. "But when asked if they would be interested in their own ca taking care of a themselves or a parent, there were high marks all around."

Lewis added that eldercare services offer an opportunity to provide the following: direct accounting and task supervision; oversight of a client's income and deposits; bill payment; routine financial transactions, including paying care providers; and investment and estate management and other services based on the individual client's needs. Eldercare also presents an opportunity to provide assurance services that include reviewing a client's financial transactions; providing reports to those who are responsible for an elderly person; and making sure that performance criteria are met by the entire team.

The AICPA and the California Society of Certified Public Accountants' (CALCPA) Education Foundation have been quick to provide professional support to CPAs interested in offering eldercare services. In addition to carrying extensive information on its Web site (www.aicpa.org), the association offers a self-study program that state societies can provide their members. CALCPA's Education Foundation, based in Redwood City, Calif., features both the AICPA course and others on eldercare throughout the year. For more information, call the foundation at (800) 922-5272 or visit their Web site at www.calcpaed.org.

In the meantime, the AICPA is working with a Boston advertising agency to develop a practitioner's kit that will include newspaper ads, brochures and a direct-mail piece. Sammon reported that consideration also is being given to developing an accreditation in eldercare services for CPAs

AICPA also distributes an excellent publication, "CPA ElderCare: A Practitioner's Resource Guide," by Jay Kaplan and Pam Kaplan. It can be ordered for $124 ($99 for AICPA members) from the institute at (888) 777-7077; refer to product number 022504rev.

Marsha Vande Berg is an San Francisco­based writer and editor. She recently completed work on "Because We Care: An Online Manual for Caregivers" for the U.S. Administration on Aging Web site at www.aoa.gov. A former op-ed page editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, she spoke on issues in aging this June at the Paris conference of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This article is excerpted with permission from CALCPA's magazine, Outlook (Spring 1999).

 

ASA home

American Society on Aging
833 Market St., Suite 511
San Francisco, CA 94103
www.asaging.org
info@asaging.org