Profile: FEI's Committee on Government Business.

• Position: Financial Executives Institute - From FEI

In this issue of Financial Executive, we continue our series of profiles of FEI's committees, which track legislative, regulatory and business developments important to financial executives.

Cooperation is the name of the game, especially when you're dealing with the federal government, says the Committee on Government Business. CGB should know, because its members, whose companies provide goods and services to the federal government in varying degrees, have to contend with its bureaucracy every day. To help foster a more productive relationship between government and industry, the committee tracks and responds to the accounting, recordkeeping and reporting issues arising from those business relationships. It also develops position statements and responds to papers written by the Cost Accounting Standards Board, as well as the Defense Contract Audit Agency and the Defense Contract Management Command, two of the most important regulatory bodies for CGB members' companies.

The committee, chaired by David M. Koonce, director of financial analysis for Martin Marietta Corp., is 37 people strong. As Koonce sees it, one of CGB's most important roles is as a forum for discussion and exchange of information. "Often, a member will ask other members for guidance on how their companies handled a particular transaction," he says. "The benefits to the membership from this kind of interaction are great, because our business and accounting decisions are different from those of purely commercial businesses." And CGB most assuredly has the Department of Defense's ear, he adds. "DOD pays attention to us and so do the government auditors, because we have a hands-on, working relationship with them to try to resolve the issues affecting our members."

CGB boasts three issues-oriented standing subcommittees -- oversight, cost-accounting standards and contractor financing. The oversight subcommittee, chaired by Harvey Miley, manager of government contracts at Eaton Corp., tracks the activities of various government oversight agencies and suggests potential topics for ad-hoc subcommittees. It's also keeping close tabs on H.R. 3477, a bill that would prevent defense contractors from being reimbursed for their environmental response costs, and it recently surveyed CGB member companies on their environmental expenditures.

The cost-accounting standards subcommittee, under chairman Ronald G. Crawford, vice president of finance and the business systems group at Textron...