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INFORMATION, The Research Department in the Executive Office is a storehouse of Think of "research" and you get the impression of people experimenting with new and far-out concepts, people sitting in ivory towers, spinning the web of accounting ten years hence. Haskins & Sells has a good share of pure research that has given birth to new techniques like Auditape and our statistical sampling methods. "But in our Executive Office Research Department," says Hal Robinson, who is partner in charge of it, "the plain fact is that our number one function is to respond to requests for assistance from the practice offices. We had over 500 requests in 1966—and there was no relation to the ivory tower in any of them. These requests demand consideration right now, because our findings will be used immediately to answer questions posed by clients." As a practical matter, a time limit of one week has been set for answering all but the most exhaustive requests so as to assure orderly handling and still allow priority handling for particularly urgent queries. What the offices ask the Research Department for is background information that they don't have the time or facilities to gather themselves. Most of this information directly concerns accounting matters. But often enough the relationship is startlingly oblique, with questions like "What was the quoted market for Company A's stock on December 31, 1899?" or "Can you find us a retail price level index for the southwest Texas area for the years 1959 to 1965?" or "Please send examples of 'phantom stock plans.'" Sometimes this primary function of the Research Department is called "answering practice office questions." But calling it that can be misleading if it makes you think the offices ask the point-blank question "How should we account for the following transaction?" In most cases the offices will answer that question themselves— after they've been supplied the background information. Of course, a good number of accounting and auditing questions do get answered in consultation with people in the Executive Office. These are questions where the business transactions involved present quite new twists, and thus the answers need exploration or development of Firm policy. They will usually be directed to Emmett Harrington, who has primary responsibility for technical aspects of our practice, or to Oscar Gellein for accounting questions, to Ken Stringer for auditing, or to Cy Youngdahl if an SEC filing is involved. In many cases these questions come back to the Research Department for background information. "Then," says John Tillotson, principal who's been fielding these requests for seven years, "what do you do? Do you go in—to Oscar Gellein, for example—and say, 'Here's all the information we've gathered for you, but, of course, we haven't tried to draw any conclusions from it'? No we don't. I don't think anyone could search out all the pertinent facts without also asking himself what the answer is." Of course, whoever referred the question recognizes this, so that he spends a good deal of time with John or others in the Research Department probing and discussing the question. Almost any time you walk down the corridor that stretches down the long back wing on the 23rd floor of Two Broadway, you will see the occupants of several of the offices hanging on to their telephones, talking to someone in Boston, San Juan, Seattle, Honolulu, or some place in between. "We prefer written communiques in the first instance," says Hal Robinson. "For one thing, it makes for efficiency in getting the question to the right party in the E.O. For another, it forces the person making the request to think through just what he wants to know, and not infrequently it turns out to be different from what he first thought it was. When that doesn't happen till after the question gets to us, time is wasted." Nevertheless, most matters do get discussed on the telephone at one time or another. Next to sitting down 10