By B.L. Wilson
George Washington University alumnus Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) shared stories Tuesday night of his life in public service and his sojourn as a 1966 GW accounting graduate to the halls of Congress.
Mr. Enzi’s visit with GW School of Business accounting students was the first in a series of distinguished speakers who will interact with the GWSB Accounting Department.
Introducing Mr. Enzi, Vivek Choudhury, interim dean of the GW School of Business, said, “It really points out there are no limits to what you can do with an accounting degree. The only limits are your imagination, your ambition and your goals in life.”
The best way to make the subject of accounting compelling, Mr. Enzi advised, is to “tell stories and don’t talk numbers.” So he told stories about a life full of public service though he had turned down a GW scholarship to graduate school because it required him to work in government for two years.
“I wrote a six-page thank you letter to George Washington University, explaining why I couldn’t accept it,” he said. “I never was going to do that.”
Hardly out of graduate school and running his own business, a shoe store, his mentor, former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo), pushed him to run for mayor of the small town of Gillette, Wyo., that was about to become a boomtown boasting vast resources of coal, oil and gas. He then spent 10 years in the Wyoming state legislature before winding up back in the nation’s capital.
Mr. Enzi recalled that as mayor he negotiated with 14 coal companies to determine their social and economic impact on the future of Gillette.
“Any of you ever read an environmental impact statement? Those of you who haven’t are in the same category as my colleagues [on the Hill],” he said. “I read 14 of those.”
Most of it was accounting information, he said, and a foundation laid at GW stood him in good stead negotiating with the oil companies, bond raters and members of the U.S. Senate, where he was the only accountant his first 14 years in national office.
“If you’ve got an accounting background, you can go through anything, any kind of a situation,” he said.
Currently chair of the Senate Budget Committee and a member of the Senate Finance Committee, his background came in handy for one of the biggest corporate scandals, Enron. It led to passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Bill, which ensures accountants have a role in regulating financial statements.
Mr. Enzi said the bill, as originally proposed, was designed to punish accountants who were part of the problem with the Houston-based energy company. But it was the senior management of Enron and the accounting firm managers who told the accountants to hide financial losses from investors.
He showed up regularly for hearings and enjoyed them. “I had never had an opportunity to ask that many accountants that many questions,” he said. Staff watching the proceedings on television told him that when the camera panned the witness table, “There was a wedge of people behind them who were all asleep.”
The senator sprinkled most of the evening with amusing anecdotes but resisted efforts to be pinned down by the audience during a Q & A session on exactly where he would cut the federal budget. It’s the budgetary process he argued that needs to be reformed.
“I’ve never had a budget that lasted 40 days before we did a waiver and overrode what we were doing,” he said. Budgeting for $4 trillion, he said, should be done incrementally, “biannually” at best, not in one year.
He told the audience that he has been guided by a basic rule in his political, business and personal life—the 80 percent rule.
“There are certain topics you can talk about successfully,” he said, “There are others if you start up you’re going to get into a big fight.“ He advised them to focus on those they could agree upon, “Now if you find one that you really feel together on, I’ll bet you agree on 80 percent of that issue.”
He said it helped him push through nearly a hundred pieces of legislation as a conservative working with one of the most liberal senators, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.).
Steven Merdinger, BA ’76, senior partner in the New York firm KMR LLP and chair of the GWSB Accounting Advisory Council, said Mr. Enzi’s presentation was the kickoff of a distinguished speakers series that is part of an initiative aimed at “expanding and improving the image of the GW Accounting Department.”
