People in H&S: Fred M. Oliver;

              PEOPLE IN H&S
The standard greeting to Fred Oliver
when he's hailed in the streets of
Salt Lake is, "Are you still keeping the
City straight?" Salt Lake City
Corporation has a ten-year record of
unparalleled fiscal soundness and
holding the line on taxes, so, of the
man about whom it was said recently
that the city has made no major
financial decision in the past ten
years without first consulting him,
that is the right question to ask.
(The answer is "yes")
Fred M. Oliver
As partner in charge of our Salt Lake
City office since 1967, Fred Oliver
must, of course, find time for a lot of
things besides consulting for his home­town
government —such things, for
instance, as serving a widely
diversified clientele, building a
professional staff of high competence
and, in the process, doubling
the revenues of the office in
his first three years.
But for more than twenty-five years
before that, governmental accounting
and finance have been his dominant
professional interest and his
capabilities have become well known
and sought after far beyond the state
of Utah. As the Firm's industry
specialist on governmental accounting
he is consultant to all our offices in
serving their governmental clients.
He is also a chief representative of
the Firm and of the profession in the
whole governmental accounting area, a
position he has achieved via two
routes: through the AICPA, where he
is now in his fourth year as chairman
of its governmental accounting and
auditing committee, and through the
National Committee on Governmental
Accounting —the source of authoritative
literature for state and local
governmental units —of which he has
been vice-chairman since 1969.
Fred started life just twelve miles
south of Salt Lake City on a 40-acre
farm that provided the greater part of
his family's sustenance. In that rugged
country and in that era, doing the
chores began early —at the age of
four, he recalls —and a young man's
summer workday could run from 4 a.m.
to 9 p.m., with maybe an hour in
mid-afternoon to cool off in
the swimming hole.
Fred's Mormon grandfather had five
wives and thirty-six children. Fred
remembers telling this to the young
children of Philip Sandmaier, then
partner in charge in Philadelphia,
when he visited there some years ago.
"Where did they all live?" gasped the
Sandmaiers. Fred assured them that
each wife maintained a separate house
and farmyard and the families mingled
freely together in their neighborhood.
to see things done right