17 10 / 2011
Accounting can be door to U.S. professional class
Urquiza, 25, is the eldest of four children of Mexican immigrants and, like many first-generation Americans, she’s found accounting to be a perfect fit.Her employer likes her work ethic and multicultural upbringing, as well as her technical mastery and spreadsheet savvy. She likes the variety of the job and its stability.Accounting has long provided a path for first-generation Americans into the professional classes. Good pay and a focus on numbers makes it an attractive career choice.Still, recruiting the children of immigrants is complex, say some Certified Public Accountants (CPAs). Parents’ opinions are influential and they often don’t know the field, a problem that alternatives like medicine or the law don’t face.Once on the job, first-generation CPAs can face new challenges like decoding the relationship-driven, sometimes self-promotional American business culture.As accounting firms rev up recruiting efforts on college campuses this fall, there is rising demand for multicultural candidates like Urquiza to match an increasingly global focus.”It’s important to have talented accountants that reflect the demographic of a global economy.” Ken Bouyer, Ernst & Young Americas director of inclusiveness recruiting, told Reuters.Specific figures on first-generation CPAs are hard to come by, but the biggest firms are spending millions of dollars on a diversification push that’s trying to reach minorities in college, high school and even as early as grammar school.At a time when it is tough for many new graduates to find work, the Big Four accounting firms — PwC, Deloitte, Ernst & Young and KPMG — report they expect to hire more than 30,000 graduates this year.Diversity in recruiting is a strong focus for all four of the U.S.-based giants of accounting, which had combined global revenue last year of more than $95 billion, said Accounting News Report, with $31 billion of that in the United States.CHOPSTICKS AND GILLIGANDeloitte & Touche partner Anna Mok was born in Hong Kong, but grew up in San Francisco, eating “with chopsticks every night,” but before dinner watching U.S. TV sitcoms like the Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island, she said in an interview.Exploiting her multicultural background, she has spent the last 20 years working with global public companies in a variety of industries. The Cantonese speaker worked for a time in Hong Kong, and now is responsible for southeast Asia and supporting the firm’s initiatives in the fast-growing Chinese market.With family and close friends overseas and observing Chinese traditions at home, Mok thinks that she grew up more globally oriented than many Americans. Now, said Mok, “that fits with where the world is going, especially the economy.”True Partners, the firm Urquiza joined in January 2010, tailors much of its recruiting to first-generation Americans.The firm focuses on city universities which often have a larger population of these students. True Partners CEO Cary McMillan said the approach is about changing demographics.The high school student population peaked about three years ago and is expected to decline for the next 20 years. With numbers declining for white and African-American students, it is more important to reach out to the children of immigrants from Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America, McMillan said.”If we don’t make an effort to reach these children and grandchildren of immigrants, we could miss some of the best kids out there,” he said.PARENTS HAVE BIG SAYRecruiting from immigrant populations can pose unique challenges. Among some groups, parents can be influential in career decisions, recruiters said.Asian parents may want their children to become engineers, doctors or lawyers. Some can be skeptical about accounting as a career, said accountants and career experts.Parents born in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries may be focused on their children going into public service, such as teaching, they said.When Maria Castanon Moats, PwC’s chief diversity officer, told her family that she planned to be a CPA, she remembers her parents asked “Why not be a lawyer?”“They did not understand this accounting thing … To them, a professional was an attorney or a doctor,” said Moats, 43.Moats, who emigrated from Mexico at the age of one with her father, a migrant farmworker, said the profession appealed to her because it brought stability. High ethical standards and integrity, strong values in her family, were also important.Now, as part of the firm’s 14-member leadership team, she welcomes young recruits with a similar background. “The first generation really wants to be successful to make their parents proud. They are committed and loyal,” she said.LOYALTY HIGHLY PRIZEDLoyalty is especially valuable to the biggest firms, which invest heavily in training and talent development, but still can suffer 20-percent-plus annual staff turnover rates.A bigger challenge than getting candidates from recent immigrant families into top firms is moving them up once they arrive. An October 2008 report by a U.S. Treasury advisory committee on auditing found that 21 percent of new hires brought into large firms in 2007 were Asian, but only 3 percent of those firms’ partners were of Asian descent.Children of Asian immigrants sometimes have language barriers, or difficulty with U.S. business culture, said Arthur Chin, executive director of Ascend, a New York-based organization launched six years ago to help close that gap.Coming from families that value technical excellence and hard work above all, many first-generation Asian American CPAs don’t recognize the importance of marketing themselves, Chin said in an October 10 phone interview. “The whole sales and marketing message needs to be developed,” Chin said.The stability and security of accounting appealed to many of the accountants interviewed for this story.Eduardo Castrejon, a 26-year-old senior tax consultant who joined True Partners in 2009, said some of his classmates with different majors still don’t have jobs.Castrejon’s mother didn’t exactly understand what field her son was getting into, but when co-workers at the factory where she has worked for 40 years were impressed by his CPA, she got a bit more comfortable with the idea.”She said, ‘I’m always going to worry about you,’” he recalled, “‘but maybe I’ll worry a little less.’”
14 10 / 2011
Obama sends military advisers to central Africa
Obama — who once denounced the LRA as an “affront to human dignity” — made clear the troops would serve as trainers and advisers in efforts to hunt down rebel leader Joseph Kony and would not engage in combat except in self-defense.In a letter to Congress, Obama said the first U.S. forces arrived in Uganda on Wednesday and would be deployed to South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo “subject to the approval of each respective host nation.”Obama’s decision commits U.S. forces to help confront a rebel group that has drawn international condemnation for decades of chilling violence, including hacking body parts off victims and the abduction of young boys to fight and young girls for use as sex slaves.While the U.S. military has maintained a large base in Djibouti since 2003, the latest mission marks an expanded role in conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa by putting U.S. troops in the field to support local forces in direct combat with insurgents.”I have authorized a small number of combat-equipped U.S. forces to deploy to central Africa to provide assistance to regional forces that are working toward the removal of Joseph Kony from the battlefield,” Obama said.A senior administration official said the mission was “time-limited” to last only months. The bulk of roughly 100 troops being dispatched were special forces, a U.S. defense official said.The limited terms of engagement appeared aimed at reassuring war-weary Americans that Obama has no plan to entangle U.S. forces directly in another conflict when they are already involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and are playing a support role in a NATO-led air campaign in Libya.Pentagon spokesman George Little said U.S. troops would train local forces in activities such as tracking, intelligence assessment and conducting patrols “to render the LRA ineffective.” The trainers “will be armed for self-defense,” Little said.Senator John McCain, Obama’s Republican opponent in the 2008 presidential election, said promoting African stability by reducing the LRA threat was a “worthy goal” but Obama should have consulted Congress before putting forces “into harm’s way.”The State Department said the troops were dispatched “with the consent” of Uganda’s government, headed by President Yoweri Museveni. His critics have accused him of using the fight against rebels as an excuse to stifle political opposition.”We didn’t solicit for this support but now that it has come we welcome it,” Felix Kulaigye, spokesman for the Ugandan army, told Reuters by telephone. “Kony is a regional security menace and the earlier we end it, the better.”KONY INDICTED ON WAR CRIME CHARGESObama asserted that U.S. forces “will only be providing information, advice and assistance to partner nation forces, and they will not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self-defense.”The LRA, which says it is a religious group, emerged in northern Uganda in the 1990s and is believed to have killed, kidnapped and mutilated tens of thousands of people.Kony has been indicted by the Hague-based International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.”The LRA continues to commit atrocities across the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan that have a disproportionate impact on regional security,” Obama said.He said U.S. advisers were needed because “regional military efforts have thus far been unsuccessful in removing LRA leader Joseph Kony or his top commanders from the battlefield.”LRA commanders have been operating in the wild and largely lawless border regions of the DRC, Central African Republic and Sudan in recent years.Although now thought to number just a few hundred fighters, the LRA’s mobility and the difficulties of the terrain have made it difficult to tackle. Attempts to negotiate peace failed in 2008 after Kony refused to sign a deal to end the killing.Uganda and Congolese officials said earlier this year they thought Kony had returned to eastern DRC, complicating U.N. efforts to stabilize the region.The U.S. military has operated a joint task force from Camp Lemonnier near the international airport in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa since 2003, its only base on the African continent. Camp Lemonnier supports about 2,500 U.S. military personnel, allied forces and defense contractors.The base, overseen by the recently created U.S. Africa Command, based in Stuttgart, Germany, is engaged in “stability operations” against Islamist militants and reportedly is being used as a base for flights of unmanned surveillance and strike aircraft over Somalia and Yemen.The United States has military personnel deployed in 34 sub-Saharan African countries, mostly small contingents of less than 40 personnel attached to the U.S. embassies.
13 10 / 2011
Radiation hotspots, strontium found in Tokyo area
The Daiichi nuclear power plant, struck by a huge quake and tsunami in March, released radiation into the atmosphere that was carried by winds and deposited widely by rain and snow in eastern Japan.Setagaya, a major residential area in Tokyo about 235 km southwest of the plant, said this week it found a radioactive hotspot on a sidewalk near schools.The radiation there measured as much as 2.7 microsieverts per hour, higher than some areas in the evacuation zone near the plant.Washing down the area with water did not help lower the radiation levels, Setagaya Mayor Nobuto Hosaka said but added that the district had been advised that it was safe for people to walk by.The city of Funabashi in Chiba, near Tokyo, said on Thursday that a citizens’ group had measured a radiation level of 5.8 microsieverts per hour at a park and it was now making checks.Government data this week showed radiation levels in the 20 km radius evacuation zone around the Daiichi plant ranged from 0.5 to 64.8 microsieverts per hour.About 80,000 residents were forced to evacuate from this zone. The unit microsievert quantifies the amount of radiation absorbed by human tissue.In Yokohama, radioactive strontium-90, which can cause bone cancer and leukemia, was detected in soil taken from an apartment rooftop, media reports said.Strontium has been detected within an 80 km zone around the Daiichi plant, but this is the first time it has been found in an area so far away, the reports said.There is no agreement among experts on the health impact of radiation exposure, but after Chernobyl, there was a substantial increase in cases of thyroid cancer in those exposed as children.Radiation exposure from natural sources in a year is about 2,400 microsieverts on average, the U.N. atomic watchdog says.Japan’s education ministry has set a standard allowing up to 1 microsievert per hour of radiation in schools while aiming to bring it down to about 0.11 microsievert per hour.Areas needing radiation cleanup in Japan could top 2,400 square km, and Japan may have to remove and dispose of enough radioactive soil to fill 23 baseball stadiums.
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13 10 / 2011
Radiation hotspots, strontium found in Tokyo area
The Daiichi nuclear power plant, struck by a huge quake and tsunami in March, released radiation into the atmosphere that was carried by winds and deposited widely by rain and snow in eastern Japan.Setagaya, a major residential area in Tokyo about 235 km southwest of the plant, said this week it found a radioactive hotspot on a sidewalk near schools.The radiation there measured as much as 2.7 microsieverts per hour, higher than some areas in the evacuation zone near the plant.Washing down the area with water did not help lower the radiation levels, Setagaya Mayor Nobuto Hosaka said but added that the district had been advised that it was safe for people to walk by.The city of Funabashi in Chiba, near Tokyo, said on Thursday that a citizens’ group had measured a radiation level of 5.8 microsieverts per hour at a park and it was now making checks.Government data this week showed radiation levels in the 20 km radius evacuation zone around the Daiichi plant ranged from 0.5 to 64.8 microsieverts per hour.About 80,000 residents were forced to evacuate from this zone. The unit microsievert quantifies the amount of radiation absorbed by human tissue.In Yokohama, radioactive strontium-90, which can cause bone cancer and leukemia, was detected in soil taken from an apartment rooftop, media reports said.Strontium has been detected within an 80 km zone around the Daiichi plant, but this is the first time it has been found in an area so far away, the reports said.There is no agreement among experts on the health impact of radiation exposure, but after Chernobyl, there was a substantial increase in cases of thyroid cancer in those exposed as children.Radiation exposure from natural sources in a year is about 2,400 microsieverts on average, the U.N. atomic watchdog says.Japan’s education ministry has set a standard allowing up to 1 microsievert per hour of radiation in schools while aiming to bring it down to about 0.11 microsievert per hour.Areas needing radiation cleanup in Japan could top 2,400 square km, and Japan may have to remove and dispose of enough radioactive soil to fill 23 baseball stadiums.
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