"Listening to a lot of professionals talk, they make it sound like trust is a core competency of our profession. Nonsense," Baker said in an interview with SmartPros. "Trust is a given in any business relationship. But just because you trust them doesn't mean you'll stick with them."

Baker, an influential leader in the profession, elaborates on this philosophy in his forthcoming book, The Firm of the Future: A Guide for Accountants, Lawyers and Other Professional Services, co-authored by Paul Dunn, due to publish next month. The authors take on the monumental and admirable task of disproving the need for billable hour pricing in the professional services firm.

Moving away from the billable hour and instead "pricing on purpose" is one of the several ways, in addition to established trust, firms can retain customers, said Baker.

Also in The Firm of the Future, the authors argue that the billable hour is drowning the potential creativity and innovation of its employees.

"We basically wrote the book because we see a gap between where the professions are and where they could be," said Baker. "Anecdotal surveys tell us that the majority of people would not pick the [accounting or legal] profession again. We want to re-ignite passion in the profession."

Baker said there is a "slight up-tick" in the number of students on college campuses who are exploring the profession. Thanks to the high-profile corporate scandals involving Enron, WorldCom, and Arthur Andersen, ethics courses have new importance to future business professionals. In fact, at Rutgers Business School, graduate students are learning how to "cook the books" in an elective course -- because "knowing how to detect cooked books requires knowing how to cook them."*

(Baker likened this to the era when, in response to gangster Al Capone's bad behavior, the Internal Revenue Service increased its recruitment of criminal investigators -- it was a CI special agent who finally nabbed Capone for tax evasion. The "Al Capone effect" worked then, as the "Enron effect" is working now.)

Baker, a CPA himself, also attributed the aggressive marketing efforts on the part of CPA societies nationwide as another reason there is an "up-tick" in student interest in accounting. State CPA societies have worked to fight the negative stereotype of accountants as "number-crunchers" since the "brain drain" became a serious concern to the profession.

Despite these positive signs that accounting is on the mend, there is an underlying problem, said Baker: "Our accounting curriculum is inadequate. Real world CPAs need to get into the classrooms of colleges and high schools as guest lecturers" in order to give students a real picture of what the profession has to offer.

The Firm of the Future offers solutions for many of the obstacles that accountants face in their profession, including how to price services. Look for the SmartPros interview with Baker next month.

Baker will be making appearances at the Association of Legal Administrators annual conference in San Diego on April 7, and the AICPA Tech 2003 show in Las Vegas, June 22-25.

* "Accounting Courses Spring to Life," New Jersey CPA, March/April 2003,pp 24-26.