Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away

In the classic fish out of water comedy, “My Cousin Vinny,” Joe Pesci plays Vincent LaGuardia Gambini, a “dees and doze” lawyer from Brooklyn who defends two teens accused of murder in a backwater Alabama town.

When questioning the timeline of a witness who claimed to be cooking grits at the time he allegedly witnessed the getaway, Pesci’s character asks him whether they were instant grits and the back and forth goes something like this…

Witness: “No self-respecting Southerner cooks instant grits.”

Gambini: So, how is it that it takes you five minutes to cook your grits, when it takes the rest of the grit-eating world 20 minutes?”

Witness: (flustered) “I’m a fast cook I guess.”

Gambini: Are we to believe that grits cook faster in your kitchen than anyplace else? Perhaps the laws of physics cease to exist on your stove.”

As you might have expected, in his own ham-handed way he discredits the witness and eventually exonerates the defendants.

So what does this have to do with the accounting profession?

Glad you asked.

Recently, I sort of experienced a My Cousin Vinny moment with several CPE directors of state CPA societies in the Northeast, which for the moment will remain nameless to protect the innocent or more accurately, the uninformed.

With the height of tax season rapidly encroaching our calls to 99 percent of CPA firms are treated with the same reverent hospitality as telemarketers selling replacement windows.

So for the next six weeks or so, we usually complete all our administrative tasks such as updating client lists, upgrading software programs and sending out CPE presentation requests to CPA state societies that happen to fall under our individual purview.

Since what we do is 99.99 percent succession related, it would stand to reason that the majority of our CPE topics fall under that critical category.

With succession planning or lack thereof, you would think that we would get more invitations to present before their membership than a Sport Illustrated swimsuit model gets date requests.

Nope. In fact two of the organizations sent a prompt “no thank you” explaining that in the past succession-related sessions did not draw well.

Does anyone else see the My Cousin Vinny parallel here?

Apparently ownership transition issues cease to exist in their states. Perhaps the immutable laws of succession don’t apply there. If not, then they should be marketing their apparently flawless transition strategies to the other 47 or so state societies.

More likely they’ll find out the hard way that unlike grits, there’s no such thing as instant succession.