Greg Faucette and Hillary Salo
By Lisa Ashmore

ewly arrived in America's most politicized city and toiling for an agency under unrelenting scrutiny, Greg Faucette (MAC '91) couldn't be happier.

He arrived in Washington, D.C., last summer to begin a professional accounting fellowship in the office of the chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) - about the time the Sarbanes-Oxley Act mandated a cure for what Enron and Andersen had wrought.

"I couldn't think of a more interesting time to be doing what I'm doing," he said.

Faucette was working at Ernst & Young's headquarters in New York when he was nominated for one of the four two-year fellowships eventually awarded. The rigorous application process required personal defense of his 10-page-plus essay on combining financial instruments and financial engineering. As bad luck would have it, on the day Faucette presented, he had a 103-degree fever and laryngitis and was "using throat lozenges like they were going out of style." Still, he was one of the four left standing.

Faucette disagrees with the media's characterization of a "distracted, demoralized staff" at the SEC.

"This has been the most active period of rule-making in the commission's history," he said.

From a rule-making perspective, Faucette's most recent work centered on efforts to set new independence rules for accountants auditing public companies. And soon, he'll be involved with the work of the International Accounting Standard Board (IASB) to create international accords.

"I'm going to be immersed in the international accounting standards arena - especially as it involves accounting for financial instruments and derivatives," Faucette said.

Faucette's prior experience included a postgraduate internship with the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) - and another UNC Kenan-Flagler accounting grad got news she's headed there soon.

Hillary Salo (BSBA '02, MAC '03) will head to Norwalk, Conn., to begin a one-year internship as a postgraduate technical assistant. Only a handful of students from around the country is selected each year.

"Just to be nominated really helps to start your career off with quite a bang … having access to that kind of in-depth information that you really can't get anywhere else," Salo said.

"Convergence between FASB and IASB is very big right now," she said, and she hopes it will be the subject of her work.

Finding harmony between the U.S. rules-based accounting and the European principles-based model "is going to dramatically change the face of accounting," Salo said. "The intellectuals believe principles-based accounting would be great … as long as there's more disclosure."

While interning at Ernst & Young's Chicago offices last summer, roughly 75 percent of her work involved former Andersen clients. Salo said although recent headlines have given the industry a black eye, "It was a few bad seeds who brought the company down."

"People have to choose whether to take the ethical route or the easy road," she said.

"You have to make intelligent decisions … and not be influenced by where the money's coming in."