How to Do as the Chinese When You're in China: Experts Provide Insight into the Culture and Customs of the World's Second-Largest Economy

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY * CPAs often put off planning for retirement and succession. The main reasons are concern that such plans will result in a loss of income, a loss of control, or both. * A two-stage deal can help move retirement and succession plans forward. The deal is designed for practitioners who are six years or less from reducing their time commitment to the practice. * Two-stage deals call for departing or selling owners to associate with successor firms for a period of time before payments commence for the sale of the practice. This allows the transitioning of clients and staff to the new firm to begin while the selling partner still controls his or her practice and maintains his or her income level. * The first phase of a two-stage deal typically lasts for a maximum of six years and acts much like a practice-continuation agreement, except with income certainty. The selling partner usually runs his or her practice through the administration and infrastructure of the successor firm. * The second phase of a two-stage deal is the buyout, which is delayed until the selling owner no longer is receiving full-time compensation. This saves the successor firm from having to pay the partner's compensation and buy his or her practice at the same time. ********** [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Four years after expanding into China, Merkle, a U.S. company that specializes in customer relationship marketing, employs more than 200 people in Shanghai and Nanjing. Sally Shanks, CPA, vice president and controller at Merkle, will always remember one of the challenges she encountered doing business in China: The document to lease office space looked nothing like the detailed contracts of 90 pages or more she was used to in the United States. In China, she received a standard one-page government contract that required negotiations that took four times longer than planned and required many compromises. As a CPA and Merkle's risk manager, Shanks said she had to refigure what were acceptable levels of risk. We weren't going to get everything that we traditionally would get in the U.S., she said. We weren't able to transfer a lot of risk onto the service providers we were partnering with. Where we would normally drive definitions and clarity into our arrangements, we had to compromise. So the company quickly realized that it had to change its mindset and how it was approaching things in China. Merkle, a private company that employs more than 1,700 people and generated more than $300 million in revenue in 2012, is among a growing number of U.5. companies that generate sales in the world's second-largest economy. In 2012, sales in China accounted for 11.2% of revenue reported by U.S. companies listed on the Standard & Poor's 500, research by The Economist suggested. The growing reliance on China's economy is increasingly exposing CPAs in business and industry and in public accounting to a business culture that may be unfamiliar and challenging. WHAT THE EXPERTS ADVISE To find out what CPAs need to know about China, the JofA asked David Wu, CPA, CGMA, a managing partner at GMP Talent International, a retained executive search firm in Shanghai; Len Jui, CPA, a partner and head of public policy and regulatory affairs at KPMG in Beijing; Henry Tam, CEO and co-founder of the American Learning Network; and William Stahlin, CPA, a professor of accounting and finance at Stevens Institute of Technology, to provide insights into Chinese business culture and customs. Wu specializes in recruiting middle-and senior-level executives in China for clients in the industrial, consumer, and life sciences sectors. He also spent more than a decade working in the United States, Canada, and Singapore. Jui was educated in the United Kingdom and the United States and worked for the SEC. Tam is a Chinese-American who has experience in Asia holding roles in business development, sales, and investments for AOL, the World Bank, PwC, and The Washington Post. …

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