Nina Gerbic oversees our financial records examination and reporting services. Nina was the first woman manager on the Minneapolis audit staff at Main Hurdman, one of the international public accounting firms that combined into today's KPMG.
Nina has been an auditor for over thirty years, and she manages our financial records practice under the demanding national firm quality standards that she learned when she first entered our profession. All six of our triennial peer system reviews have received unqualified opinions, with no critical comment letters.
Not every firm adheres to the kind of standards that Nina insists upon, and she has found that quite troublesome. In response, she has served as a member and review team captain for the Washington State Board of Accountancy Quality Assurance Review Committee since 1987.
In addition to her decades of experience, Nina brings extensive academic achievements to her financial record engagements. She completed her undergraduate degree in Accounting from St. Cloud State University with high honors, and her University of Washington Masters Degree in Economics with membership in the Omicron Delta Epsilon international economics honorary.
Over the past decade Nina has added numerous professional certification programs in response to the increasing complexity both of the overall economy and of the transactions, financial instruments and business entities that make it up.
In response to the movement toward reporting investments at fair market value, Nina became a Certified Valuation Analyst and obtained both the Business Valuation and Advanced Business Valuation Educational Achievement Certificates from the American Institute of CPAs. To more fully understand today's exotic hybrid securities, designer business entities, and globalized markets, Nina invested the three years of study necessary to become a Chartered Financial Analyst charterholder.
Because of the increasing emphasis on fraud detection in financial statement preparation, Nina became a Certified Forensic Financial Analyst with additional training and certification in Advanced Economic Damages, Fraud Prevention and Detection, and Forensic Accounting, and has become a Certified Fraud Examiner candidate.
To be prepared for the complexities involved in insolvent entities' financial reporting, Nina became a Certified Insolvency and Restructuring Advisor, earning the bronze medal on her qualifying examinations. And during 2005 Nina completed the requirements for a Certification in Distressed Business Valuation, an even more advanced program that called on all of her prior learning.
Nina doesn't operate our financial record examination practice alone, of course. Our professional staff are all highly trained accountants, and we all have some involvement in the financial record examination function. The staff accountants performing the fieldwork on our financial statement engagements have multiple graduate degrees and years of experience in significant corporate positions.
Nina's assistant in our financial statement practice, Svetlana Fomitcheva, has Masters Degrees both in Economics from Nizhny Novgorod State University in Russia and in Professional Accounting, with a concentration in Auditing and Assurance, from the University of Washington. In the period between those two academic programs she spent four years in significant financial posts at major Russian corporations: first as a senior economic analyst at Lukoil; and then as chief financial analyst in the Finance Department of Avtodor.
We place some limitations on our financial statement practice. Because we strive for top-level, current competence in any engagement we perform, we do not perform audits of publicly-held companies or of firms in unfamiliar specialized industries.
We are not limited by certain other constraints which often trouble firms of our size, however. Becky Meehan, Eva Leung and Joe Dawson’s experience in income tax dispute resolution and our numerous qualifications as Certified Insolvency and Restructuring Advisors make us comfortable in providing financial record services to companies that have encountered tax or financial difficulties. Our staff's multi-national backgrounds and our firm's membership in the Premier International Associates affiliation of accounting firms permit us to effectively serve businesses with world-wide activities. And our extensive accounting and auditing library gives us confidence that we are unlikely to overlook significant changes in accounting principles or reporting requirements.
