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-five 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 - a highly unusual achievement.
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. During 2009, she was selected as a charter member of the State Board’s newly-created Peer Review Oversight Committee.
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 Master of Economics with membership in the Omicron Delta Epsilon international economics honorary.
During the past decade Nina became certified in Financial Forensics by the American Institute of CPA's, and she has added numerous additional 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 earned both the Business Valuation and Advanced Business Valuation Educational Achievement Certificates of 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 intense 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. During 2005, Nina became the first Washington practitioner to complete 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 is highly trained accountants, and we all have some involvement in the financial record examination function. The senior accountants performing the fieldwork on our financial statement engagements each have multiple graduate degrees and years of experience in significant corporate positions.
We place some limitations on our financial statement practice. Because we strive for top-level, current competence in any engagement we perform, we no longer perform financial statement audits.
We are not limited by certain other constraints which often trouble firms of our size. Joe Dawson’s and Eva Leung'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 permit us to effectively serve businesses with foreign activities or ownership. And our extensive accounting and auditing library gives us confidence that we are unlikely to overlook significant changes in accounting principles or reporting requirements.
