By Camille Wilmes
Accounting students are pushed to choose either tax or audit as they navigate their way through school. Most professors do not even mention career possibilities in private accounting. Accounting Club’s remedied this by featuring two distinguished professionals from the ever growing private company of Koch Industries. Lauren Trace and Ryan Reach led the discussion about the various opportunities at Koch, specifically one of the Koch subsidiaries Koch Energy. Koch currently has nearly 120,000 employees and will gain an additional 17,000 from the new acquisition of N4. This demonstrates Koch’s exponential growth from 1996 when Koch had a total workforce of 10,000 employees.
Koch refers to their financial employees as “financial athletes.” They are referred to as such because of the need to be able to communicate the company’s financial statements to a variety of different audiences and need to be able to effectively communicate the data to each audience. This was emphasized by a brief game titled “Match the Description with the Role.” As the title suggests, the audience had to match the job description of various jobs to their respective job titles. The game demonstrated the vast occupational responsibilities of the various jobs accountants are responsible for inside Koch Industries.
One of the topics that kept recurring was the topic of “value maximization.” In most of the cases mentioned, the job description did not perfectly line up with the employees’ degrees. Koch tries to align the employees capabilities with the job that adds the most value to the company. Koch also encourages employees to continue learning by paying the employees CPA exams and employee tuition reimbursement. Lauren and Ryan enlightened the members of the Accounting Club of benefits of working as an accountant in private accounting.