Curiously, his first step toward this distinguished career began with a college job in the mail room at Union Carbide in San Francisco, and among his duties was delivering mail to the internal audit department. “I got to know some of the employees,” he recounts, “and they encouraged me to look into accounting as a profession.” As a math major he felt an affinity to the work they were doing. He recognized that “math is the language of accounting,” and saw that accounting offered something practical to do with the math he was studying.

After finishing college and a stint in the army, he went to work for the public firm of John F. Forbes & Co. “They were big in professional association involvement,” he comments, and so he joined CalCPA and became active in committee work for the San Francisco Chapter, eventually chairing the Accounting and Auditing Committee. During those years he was working his way up at Forbes. He made partner in 1977 and then opened an office for the firm in San Jose in 1981. When his firm won the engagement as auditor for CalCPA, he learned how the organization functioned, and he got to know its then executive director, Jim Kurtz.

He left Forbes in 1984 after it had begun a couple of merges to become part of KPMG, but he says his years in public practice taught him a great deal about the kinds of issues that engage many CalCPA members. He “did a lot of auditing and business consulting for small to medium-size companies,” and he worked with a lot of startup-ups. He became familiar with the challenges of organizing a business and raising capital.

After leaving Forbes, he spent a short time in private accounting working for a developer. This experience broadened his outlook, but, he adds, when Jim Kurtz invited him to join the CalCPA staff, it seemed like a natural move. He was familiar with the organization and its goals.

Then in 1985 when the professional liability insurance market was going through a hard cycle, he found himself the lead person in the formation of CAMICO and later its CEO. With these new responsibilities he knew he had to let go of his leadership role in the Group Insurance Trust and turned this responsibility over to its first executive director, Ken Ashcraft.

The years since have witnessed major changes for both the Trust and CAMICO, but as one of the few individuals who have served on the two boards, Dodsworth sees parallels. Both CAMICO and the Trust he says, “have similar purposes and structure. They are member-owned, and they both have robust loss-prevention measures. Both provide real advocacy for members, and they stretch to provide services rather than limit their coverage.” He adds that the two organizations also provide resource support and information to each other.

In order to ensure that the Trust continues to be governed by dedicated, knowledgeable members, it is expanding its pool of qualified future trustee candidates. Several appointed committee member positions are available to CalCPA members who are currently participating in a ProtectPlus medical plan. Due to the complicated nature of the Trust, ideal candidates are from firms with 15 or more employees, who can be reasonably expected to remain in active practice and serve the Trust for many years. Candidates are appointed for a two-year term and may be reappointed for a second two-year term. Appointed committee members sit on committees of the Board and attend four committee meetings and one board meeting per year. Appointed committee members are eligible for the same level of employer reimbursement compensation as trustees, and all out-of-pocket expenses are reimbursed.

If you are interested in applying, please send your resume with a cover letter of introduction to: Susan Young, executive director, The Group Insurance Trust, 1235 Radio Road, Redwood City, CA 94065-1217.

Phillips joined CalCPA in 1968 shortly after receiving his CPA license. In 1972 he became a member of the Insurance Committee when Jim Kurtz, the long-time CEO of CalCPA, served as its Secretary. The Committee at that time was charged with overseeing all CalCPA-sponsored insurance plans and the Trust. This area of service also fit well with his professional responsibilities at Coopers & Lybrand in San Francisco where he  had become the first employee in what over many years would become a major human resource advisory group. One might say that Phillips was in the right place at the right time in respect to both his job and volunteer service, but that wouldn’t do justice to his enthusiasm for the work that engaged him over his long career. He has always found, he says, the precision of numbers to be “fun” and looked forward to his work every day—31 years with Coopers & Lybrand (now PricewaterhouseCoopers) and 10 years as executive director of the Trust.

After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley in 1962, serving in the military, and entering the workforce, Phillips soon saw, as he puts it, that “the language of business is accounting.” This insight inspired a return to Cal for an MBA with an accounting emphasis, which he earned in 1966, and then a stint at Golden Gate University at night for an MBA in taxation in 1972.

Already employed and trained as a CPA at Coopers & Lybrand, when the opportunity arose to join the actuarial group, he took the leap. He learned, he says, by doing the work in front of him. He took and passed the exams required to became an Enrolled Actuary and became a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries. He became a partner in Coopers & Lybrand in 1974 and built a human resources advisory group that ultimately employed 110 partners and employees in San Francisco and another 70 in Los Angeles. They had among their clients some of the country’s largest companies.

While Phillips’ own practice was “mostly on the pension side,” he managed departments that offered a range of benefit consulting services, including defined benefit plans, defined contribution plans, health care plans, and compensation plans. About the latter he comments with characteristic wry humor, “people think that creating a compensation plan is easy, but it’s trickier than it looks. Without realizing it, you can incentivize the wrong actions. Certainly there has been plenty of evidence corroborating this principle in the last year or so.”

When he became executive director of the Group Insurance Trust after retiring from Coopers & Lybrand in 1997, he made it his chief goal to provide member-owned firms with an economical, competitive, high quality health insurance program. In establishing the new company, he wrote the original policies and procedure manual that created the operating structure for the Group Insurance Trust and comments with pride, “We set up an insurance company. It worked well, and it continues to.” Looking back on his years as Executive Director, he acknowledges that the one area of the job that always felt like a challenge was in sales and marketing. In this regard, he is very pleased that Susan Young, the current ED, and Tom Kowalski, Sales Manager, provide strong leadership in areas where it was most needed.

At present, Phillips continues as a Trustee and as chair of the Finance and Investment Committee. In this capacity he helps monitor the investment portfolio and evaluate the need for change even as the Trust maintains the steady course that he helped create.

“It may be a cliché,” says Stu Weinstein, chair of the Group Insurance Trust Claims and Plan Design Committee, “but I have gotten a lot out of my relationship with CalCPA as member, and so serving as a trustee, and finding products and services that benefit members, is a great way to give  back.” To this he adds, “Its enjoyable to be associated with something as successful as the Group Insurance Trust has been.”

In addition to his spirit of service, Weinstein also embodies a broad range of professional experience that helps him understand the circumstances of different members. Having graduated with a degree in accounting from the University of California, Berkeley in the late 1960s, Weinstein started his career with a large regional accounting firm where he served until receiving his license. From there he moved to a consulting firm and then to a job as controller in McKesson Corporation’s International Division.

He comments that this experience was a unique opportunity

“to observe the  inside of a business from the client’s perspective, something that many CPAs don’t get a chance to do.”

He was fascinated to see how an enterprise is built, how people are responsible for the bottom line, and how they report to others. He was also engaged by the process of building appropriate controls. At the end of the day, however, he found the work repetitive, and he turned back to public accounting with renewed interest.

He joined his father, who had been working as a solo CPA, in forming Weinstein & Company, where he stayed until 1999. At that point he found himself ready for a more corporate structure and moved to Rooney, Ida, Nolt and Ahern, which had just opened a San Francisco office. He liked the fact that they had separate departments with specialties and that clients were shared.

This structure also meant that his clients had a place to stay as he transitioned into retirement during the years from 2005 to 2007. Currently he still provides occasional services as a consultant and also continues as a director of CAMICO Mutual Insurance Company.

As far as the GIT is concerned, however, he is very much engaged by the challenge of providing price competitive insurance services that most public sector members couldn’t get on their own.

“There is excitement,” he says, “in working on flexible plan designs that work well for small as well as large firms. The test is to create plans that people can afford while providing as many options  as possible.”

He is proud of the high level of service members receive and pleased at the broad geographic coverage provided by Anthem Blue Cross. The fact that the GIT’s only stakeholders are its member-employers makes it easier to achieve these goals.

As chair of the Claims and Plan Design Committee he is concerned with the marketing of the entire program as well as the details of its many plans, and he has advocated the addition of more marketing and sales options for ProtectPlus, including the use of a general agency and its associated brokers.

“This option allows us to reach more potential members than simply using the direct distribution option that has been used since the Trust was founded. In a profession with an aging population, one way to continue to keep costs down, is to reach out to more members so that our overhead  costs are shared over a broader base.”

For the future, he hopes to see more member firms enroll in ProtectPlus.

“Most firms who take the time to explore the GIT options find that it is a very competitive program, frequently better than what they have in place.”