Best paper awards;

              Notifying the offices that had award-winners
this year required some long
long-distance calls: the nearest one to
the Executive Office was Chicago, the
next Houston, and two were on the
West Coast. Without attempting to
assess significances of geographical dis­tribution,
it is a fact that, taking the
Mississippi as a divider, and including
1965-66 results, 21 winners over the
years have been east and 21 have been
west of the river. For individual office
honors, Chicago now leads San Fran­cisco
nine to eight.
Sheldon Richman, principal, Los
Angeles, won First Award of $750 for
his paper Tax Savings Through Post­mortem
Tax Planning.
In comparatively few pages, Mr.
Richman throws into bold relief the
many fine points of timing and coordi­nation
that are the ingredients of suc­cessful
tax planning. At the outset he
briefly explains the significance of what
is to come and so provides the reader
with a welcome assist in grasping this
quite complicated subject. The salient
prerequisite for minimizing taxes of all
parties concerned in an estate, he ex­plains,
is information: knowledge of the
estate, of the income in the hands of
the fiduciary, of the beneficiaries' tax
brackets, of all parties' needs for cash.
This knowledge the professional tax
man utilizes in applying his techniques,
including the forecasting of all assets,
obligations, and income of the dece­dent
and the estate; his greatest
acumen is demonstrated in correlating
the resultant with "the interplay of the
many facets of the tax law." The deci­sions
made early in the administration
of the estate on the basis of these
studies determine to an important ex­tent
the tax savings obtainable "over
many future years." This paper was
presented before the Southern Arizona
Estate Planning Council in May 1966
and is scheduled to be published in the
University of Arizona Law Review,
Spring 1967 issue.
Dwight A. Johnson, manager,
Chicago, won Second Award of $500
for his paper Audit of a Sales Depart­ment—
A Case Study of a Management
Audit.
For illustrating the transition from
traditional auditing areas to the less
familiar areas of operational auditing,
Mr. Johnson has chosen the Sales Engi­neering
Department of a company in
the aero-space industry. This turned
out to be a department where docu­ments
or records for testing accuracy,
completeness, timeliness, and satis­factory
performance of work were
almost completely lacking, and suscep­tibility
of the department to traditional
auditing techniques was at a minimum.
Thus it provided the auditor with a
work climate that favored considerable
latitude for individual creative effort.
His experience in conducting this audit,
his findings concerning administrative
controls, and his specifications for the
development of records whose value
to management could be recommended
with reasonable certainty, are well de­scribed
in this paper. The original pre­sentation
was before the Institute of
Internal Auditors in Dayton in October
1965. The Internal Auditor will pub­lish
the paper in its Spring 1967 issue.
Kenneth E. Studdard, principal,
Houston, won Third Award of $300 for
his paper Planning Effective Gifts—
What, When, How, and to Whom.
In this article Mr. Studdard develops
the theme of giftmanship as an art,
bringing into view the essentially com­plex
arrangements to be considered if
the donor's purposes are not to fail.
Mr. Studdard lays some groundwork of
gift-making principles and then makes
his main thrust through the intricacies
of life insurance trusts and inter vivos
trusts, accumulating convincing evi­dence
along the way that decisions
must be correct from a tax standpoint
if both donor and donee are to be as­sured
of full advantage of the gift. This
paper was presented as a talk before
the Estate Planning Conference spon­sored
by the Texas Society of CPAs in
September 1966.
Kenneth C. Cole, manager, San
Francisco, won Fourth Award of $200
for his article Evaluating Proposals
from Computer Manufacturers.
The scope and depth of studies
which manufacturers make to support
equipment and systems proposals vary
greatly. For ensuring that the prospec­tive
purchaser of a computer avails
himself of the greatest usefulness from
these studies, Mr. Cole makes clear
that top management must assume its
rightful responsibility for designating
the problems to be solved and the
specific applications to be selected, for
appraising the competence of those en­gaged
in the program on both sides,
and for guarding against a wrong
choice. This paper was published in
Management Services magazine, No­vember-
December 1965 issue.
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