It wouldn’t be quite fair to say that John Phillips was there in the beginning, but as the Group Insurance Trust’s longest-serving member and former Executive Director, he has been intimately involved in the evolution and growth of CalCPA’s insurance program for almost 40 years, including formation of the group health insurance program as a Multiple Employer Welfare Arrangement (MEWA).
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. (continue reading…)
