A man and his standards: protecting investors an important task for SEC Chief Accountant.

• Author: English, Damien B.M.
• Position: Interview

SEC Chief Accountant Conrad Hewitt has held on of the most visible accountancy jobs in the nation for more than a year. The pressure of his job is apparent: his office is involved in many difficult and unique accounting and auditing problems of SEC registrants and the external auditing firms--and is subject to congressional and press inquiries.

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Simply put, Hewitt's job it to "fulfill the mission as a regulator to protect the investor," and includes responsibilities such as dealing wit SOX implementation and related issues, FASB and PCAOB oversight, and international convergence of accounting standards.

Recently, California CPA caught up with Hewitt during his stop through the SEC's San Francisco office to discuss the man, the job and the workload.

Q. Tell me about yourself and how you ended up becoming a CPA? How and when did you become involved with the SEC?

I grew up in Sheffield, Ill., a small farming community. I graduated from the University of Illinois, with a bachelor's degree in finance and economics and did post-graduate work at the University of Southern California.

Career-wise, I started with a bank in Peoria, Ill., before I joined the Air Force. The Air Force didn't know what to do with me, because I wanted to work in a bank. They said, "Lt. Hewitt, We don't have banks in the Air Force, but we need an auditor." I had never taken any auditing courses, but they said they would send me to auditing school, which they did. I became an auditor of Strategic Air Command Headquarters, which was a great duty, for about four years.

After that I decided to go into public accounting and joined Ernst and Ernst (a predecessor of Ernst & Young), in Los Angeles, and had my CPA license a year or two afterward. I stayed in public accounting for 33 years working up and down the West Coast doing various things. The firm had a mandatory retirement age for partners when I signed the partnership agreement in 1973. I thought that was a great way to go and was looking forward to it. The day came and the day after I retired, I became the Superintendent of Banks for the state of California.

Once in that job, I consolidated all the financial institutions in California into a new department called the Department of Financial Institutions. That took me about two years, and I became the first Commissioner for Financial Institutions, which I did for about four years. When the governor's term was ending, so was mine, and I decided to go and play golf, but another company knew I was around and wanted me to join their board, which I did.

I ended up being on a number of different for-profit companies' boards of directors. I was chair of all of those audit committees. I was on the boards of five companies at the end of that era before I accepted the Chief Accountant position.

Chairman Cox's vision and strategy were in line with mine, and we both wanted to make some changes, so I decided to help for a few years. I thought it was a good way to cap my career in accounting.

Q. What are your responsibilities?

My main responsibility is to protect the investor. That involves a lot of different factors: oversight of FASB, oversight of PCAOB and international convergence situations. It involves a lot of different areas; my office works very closely with the enforcement, corporation finance, investment management and market regulation divisions...