Customer Reviews

Financial Reporting of Environmental Liabilities and Risks after Sarbanes-Oxley

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Finally, someone got it right. This might be the most important book written about environmental management in years.

New accounting standards will feed environmental management into the teeth of Sarbanes-Oxley. Readers get all the information they need in a format that is accessible to a wide variety of professional disciplines.

This books pulls together brilliantly the complexities of the multi-disciplinary challenges of reporting environmental liabilities after Sarbanes-Oxley and FIN 47.

All other books and papers I read are focused on one angle of the topic, looking at environmental liabilities in just one dimension. This book saves hours of study and research, all work is done for the reader. Quick read, logically structured.

Before I read Greg Rogers book, I thought accountants were mere number crunchers and that the lion's share of the crunching would eventually be performed by a sophisticated software package-- or at least people in India. The happy truth (for accountants, anyway,) is that accounting is an inherently SUBJECTIVE (and, therefore, not highly-outsourcable discipline.) A less happy (and somewhat scary) truth is that I actually found Rogers' treatment of accounting fascinating. Yes, it may be that I need to get a life, but this book is a must-read for anyone who wants to excel in the environmental industry.

As a testament to the readability of the book, I will share a short anecdote. In preparation for a presentation that I was to give at a large accounting firm in New Jersey on behalf of my environmental consulting company(Hydrotechnology Consultants, Inc.), I asked my assistant to order Rogers' book on Amazon. She unwittingly requested shipping via media mail (a.k.a. snail mail.) As the date for the seminar approached, she assured me that the book was scheduled to arrive "any day." It was two days before the seminar and the book had apparently taken a detour to media mail hell. I told her that she needed to secure the book for me by the next day or invest in a warm hat and a pair of gloves-- because it tends to get rather cold in the unemployment line. In desperation, she called Greg Rogers and begged him to ship the book overnight. Greg took pity on her plight and shipped the book for morning delivery-- leaving me exactly one day to read the book, digest its contents and regurgitate it to an audience of accountants. To make a long story short, the presentation went off without a hitch. The accountants were highly impressed with my knowledge of environmental accounting, but seemed somewhat uncomfortable with my level of enthusiasm. Therefore, I offer this advice to Greg Rogers: place a label on the book cover which reads, "Caution: Contents May Shock and Awe!"