Summing up Sid: The ultimate CPA and friend to all

Plenty of CPAs can say they learned something from Sid Kess, who died last week at age 97. Some earned CPE credits from a Kess conference session, others read his book, and some learned simply how to treat other people.

Kess was passionately devoted to the profession; he continued serving on conference planning committees well into his 90s. As recently as 2022, Kess was honored with others in the profession at AICPA & CIMA ENGAGE. The specific award given then to Kess was the Stanley H. Breitbard Personal Financial Planning Division Lifetime Achievement Award. It is one of many such honors, not that Kess was in it for awards.

In 2016, he received a separate PFP award. In 2011, he received the AICPA’s highest honor. In 2010, an award related to continuing education was named after him. That’s the way it was for Kess, who devoted his life to the profession.

This episode of the JofA podcast shares more memories of Kess, dating back 50 years.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• Background information on Sid Kess, who died last week at age 97.
• What Kess taught Marty Finn about relationship-building at conferences.
• David Lifson’s surprise that Kess remembered him from a meeting that occurred at least 10 years earlier.
• Julie Welch’s memory of when Kess suffered broken bones just before an AICPA video session but carried on. 
• AICPA & CIMA CEO Barry Melancon’s early dealings with Kess.
• Why Melancon said that “you hated to disappoint” Kess.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

David Lifson: He was the ultimate CPA.

Barry Melancon: Just incredible ability to remember names and faces and stories.

Julie Welch: Very much a leader, a friend, a mentor. He leaves behind an incredible legacy.

Marty Finn: When I met him, it was like, “Wow, this is Sid Kess. I’m meeting a giant.”

Neil Amato: Today, the Journal of Accountancy podcast celebrates the life and lifetime contributions to the accounting profession, of Sid Kess.

This is Neil Amato with the JofA. I never had the pleasure of meeting Kess, but the stories I’ve heard make me feel like I knew him and the impact he had.

Kess died at the age of 97, and it was a life well-lived, personally and professionally. As you heard in those introductory clips, Kess was a giant in the profession, especially as it related to continuing professional education and also in the realms of tax and financial planning.

In the show notes for this episode will be a link to our article remembering the contributions of the guy everyone considered a best friend, the guy everyone knew simply as Sid.

The first of four conversations is with a CPA named Marty Finn.

Amato: What to you made Sid Kess so special?

Finn: Still kind of raw. Sorry, Neil.

Amato: I get it.

Finn: He cared. He was brilliant, a great tax practitioner. He was a guy that always had ideas, right up till weeks ago, Neil, when we were planning next year’s AICPA ENGAGE conference, he was on calls and had ideas. He cared so deeply about people that he was associated with, and you knew it every time you talked to him. When we’d see each other at conferences, his first question was not about the conference. It was, “How is your wife? How are the boys?” That was always his first question. We’d talk about that and then we’d start talking about the conference.

But just incredible how much he cared about people deeply, and he was a mentor to thousands of CPAs, and he was a mentor to me. First and foremost, he was a friend. You always felt that, and anybody you talk to is going to say the same thing. You always felt that from him, that he was your friend.

Amato: In what ways besides AICPA conferences did you work with him or alongside him or interact with him?

Finn: That’s how I got to know him. I had a colleague back 20-plus years ago that was involved in the AICPA Tax Strategies for High-Income Individuals Conference, and that colleague said to Sid, “Hey, you might want to have Marty on the conference to talk about a topic.” I got involved in the conference by speaking on it, got to know Sid from that. Several years later he asked me to be on the conference committee to plan the conference.Then I’ve just known on the committee for 20-plus years.

It was primarily through conferences and speaking engagements that I got to know him. He encouraged me to write a book and he helped me figure out how to do that. There are other things along the way, but it was primarily my involvement was through the AICPA.

Amato: It’s about 20 years ago, you meet this guy. He passed away at age 97. Did you ever think, gosh, why am I meeting this 77-year-old?

Finn: Yeah, and just like everybody else will tell you the same thing: You knew of him. I had listened to his CPE tapes and done some of his education stuff previous to that. So I knew of this guy, and then when I met him, it was like, “Wow, this is Sid Kess. I’m meeting a giant.” But yeah, he was 77 years old at that time when I met him, or 75 or whatever. He’s still going strong and didn’t miss a beat for the 20-plus years that I knew him.

Amato: That to me is the amazing thing.

Finn: It is amazing.

Amato: It’s one thing to say, “I met a giant of the profession” when that person is in their 70s. But then that person continued to be a friend and a mentor to you for 20 more years.

Finn: Yeah, absolutely. He was working right up to the end. It’s just crazy. He loved it so much. He loved what he was doing. He loved writing, he loved talking to colleagues of any age and helping them with whatever their needs were. He wanted to do that.

Amato: When you think about him at a conference, you told the story about him asking about your wife and your kids and then talking about the conference. But someone else said to me that they just have this image in their mind of Sid shaking everyone’s hand as they left.

Finn: Yeah, everybody knew him. He’d be at the conference just talking to people and people coming up to him and chatting and saying, “Hey, Sid, I’ve been listening to your tapes and CDs for years on CPE.”

Some of the things he taught me: At these conferences that we have, we have sponsors, groups that want to come and exhibit their wares at the conference. He used to tell me, “Go around.” He used to do it, and he encouraged me, “Go around and talk to all of them, and thank them for being there and tell them how important they are to the conference.” It made a big deal to these folks knowing that they were important to be part of the conference.

Amato: He’s just a people person that everyone remembers, and everyone feels like he is their best friend, you know?

Finn: Yes. It’s incredible how he does it. Anybody you talk to says the same thing: “Oh yeah, he was my best friend and colleague and mentor.”

Amato: Again, that was Marty Finn. Next up, I asked David Lifson, another longtime CPA and longtime Sid Kess mentee, about the first time he met Kess.

Lifson: I met him in the ’70s when I was just entering the profession, and he was already a quarter of a century into it, if you can believe that. The scary thing about Sid is, he was just as smart at 97 as he was at 47 – let me put it that way. He was sharp as a tack then. He always had a laid-back manner, but you should have never let that fool you. He knew exactly what was going on, and you could ask him any question and he’d give you a pretty darn accurate answer.

Amato: So you meet him in the 1970s. Where was that?

Lifson: We were both with J. K. Lasser, which became part of Touche Ross, which became part of Deloitte & Touche. I was a wet-eared junior accountant who had worked in their Jacksonville office when I was in college, and somehow wound up by a quirk of fate to work in their New York office after I graduated from college. He was very involved in the same building with the J. K. Lasser tax guide. I was actually on the audit department, but I met him then.

It’s amazing because I didn’t see him again for another almost 10 or 15 years. And because I was doing a conference on real estate, I was involved with the New York State Society of CPAs – and he remembered meeting me. It was frightening. I’m some junior accountant, but I was asking for some tips about a program I was giving and somebody said, “Well, you ought to talk to Sid Kess, he could probably tell you.”

I had never given a program, I was petrified. I was a three-year junior – I guess I was just promoted to senior accountant in those days – but he remembered the meeting, and it always freaked me out. But as I got to know him as the years passed, I realized I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Amato: Your sound broke up just briefly when you first started that answer. The name of the firm then was J. K. Lasser?

Lifson: J. K. Lasser, yeah. Jacob Lasser was one of the deans of the profession in the ’30s and ’40s, and he had founded that firm.

Amato: Over the years after you met him, at an age where for most people he would be thinking about retirement, he just kept going.

Lifson: Well, there was an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal. [The headline said:] When will I retire? Never! Terrific article; it summed Sid up perfectly. If you love what you’re doing, why should you retire? I think if you asked him today from on high, that’s what he would tell you. “I love what I do, so I’m going to continue to do it. I’m not going to stop it just because I’m 65 or 72 or 96.”

Amato: When was the last time you saw him in person?

Lifson: I guess it was at the tax conference pre-COVID, so probably 2018 or ’19. I don’t remember which year. I remember sitting at the table with him. He was at the conference with his son, and he was as engaging as ever.

Amato: What images do you have of him at conferences, besides that last meeting? I’ve been told people see him and can just picture him shaking hands with everyone as they’re like leaving a session or something like that. Is there anything like that that pops into your mind about Sid?

Lifson: I teased him once about being Yoda-esque. He was like, “I know all, see all.” But he didn’t go out – he never needed to self promote. All you had to do was talk to him, and he always spoke in a rational voice. He was not a boisterous man, at least my experience with him, but he was extremely engaging, absolutely extremely engaging.

He was a great person to know. Sid had an incredible breadth of knowledge, and he was willing to share it. That’s not a common attribute of people, but it is the epitome of being a CPA. He was the ultimate CPA.

Amato: Next up is Julie Welch, a CPA in the Kansas City area who considers Kess a very important role model to her, but also a friend.

What to you made Sid Kess the standout CPA and person that he was?

Welch: He was just the kindest person, the best type of person you could have for a mentor. He just remembered everything and would do anything for you. I remember one time he had me come out to New York to do a speech, and I was pregnant at the time. He calls me in advance. He tells me where all the hospitals are in New York. He gives me his home number and probably his address and said, “If you need something, you come and call me.” And I’m like, “I’m just coming there for a little bit.” “You never know what’s going to happen when you’re pregnant.”

Another time, I’m taking a taxi back to the airport, and he saw me getting in the taxi, and he said, “Wait a minute.” He gets the guy’s license plate number and everything, and he goes, “You call me when you get to the airport and then you call me when you get home so I know you got home.” I mean, it wasn’t just come and do this for me and let’s do professional things. But let’s care about people.

Sid has a book, The Sid Kess Approach. And the first concept in there is “truly put people first,” and he certainly did that with everybody. He made each person feel special. I feel really special, but I’m sure that everybody else that he was friends with, they were the most special person in his life as well because he really felt that way about people. And his family, he just felt so deeply moved by his family, and he would talk to his grandsons every day. Just all the time, he was so proud of what they did and would always talk ’em up, how they were doing and what they were doing. He was just blessed that he would get a phone call from him every day.

Amato: Did you know him as Sid or Sydney?

Welch: Sid.

Amato: He was just Sid to everyone, and he was like a best friend to everyone.

Welch: Yeah, he really was. He just took you under his wing, and he was the ideas man. When I say ideas man, you go into a meeting with Sid, and you feel embarrassed because you only have six or seven points that you wrote down for ideas. He’s got pages of them for every meeting. He’s got pages of ideas and he’s like, “If one of ’em sticks, we did good.”

Amato: Do you remember the first time you interacted with him at a conference?

Welch: I do. It was Tax Strategies for High-Income Individuals. I believe it was in Miami. It was the first time I really interacted with him. I had been to the conference before when it was at other places. But this time. they even had little sheets in the packet to fill out if you were interested in serving on an AICPA committee or something. I filled out that little sheet. Next thing I knew, Sid Kess is on the phone calling me, getting me on committees, and everything else.

One other time I wrote a book. I still write a book, 101 Tax Saving Ideas, and Sid bought a dozen copies. I didn’t know who Sid Kess was at the time. I get the order form and I’m like, “You think this is the real Sid Kess? Why would he want 12 of my books?” And I think it was just to promote, just really tell somebody, “Hey, you’re doing a good job. I’m going to help you out.” Because, heck, when you write a book and it’s your first book and somebody buys 12 of them, you never forget it.

Amato: I’ve been with the AICPA since 2012. My first month on the job was when the 125th anniversary issue came out. And, in the JofA for that month, we published a special edition which included 125 people of impact in accounting. And so we had that list, and of course, Sid Kess was on that list. Obviously, he was someone that a lot of people knew and admired.

Welch: Right. well, I can tell you that at the tax strategy conference, there’s a family of people that come, and they’ve come every year because they just loved to hear Sid Kess. And they took his classes when he started classes way, way, way back when, and their son got involved in accounting so that’s why now they all come – the whole family comes. And they just think Sid is the greatest person.

He shares so many good ideas and puts together great conferences content for people to learn. He just really wants to share ideas. There’s no reason to – if you’ve got something, don’t hog it, share it. He’s just an incredible connector of people.

Amato: I asked Marty this: It seems like he was one of those people that hundreds of different people thought he was their best friend.

Welch: Yes.

Amato: Just so helpful to everyone.

Welch: Definitely. I would get phone calls. I still have them on my voice messages, because he called right up until the end here. He’d go, “Oh, this is Sid. Call me back.” And he’d always leave his phone number. Like I wouldn’t have it memorized by now, because we talked quite frequently.

Amato: It sounds like you’re going to miss those calls.

Welch: Yeah, I will miss those calls. He was a unique individual, very much a leader, a friend, a mentor. He leaves behind an incredible legacy on what he did for me but for our profession, and for everybody else who became a friend to Sid. Sid was a friend of everybody.

Then another thing about Sid is he never missed commitments. If he made a commitment to speak at something, he was there. A time that I witnessed him doing something, it was an AICPA videotaping. On the way into the studio, getting out of the car, he fell. It turns out he broke, I think, his pelvic bone.

But he fell, came on up to the studio, and he just sat down and we pushed him around in a chair. When it’s time to eat, push him in a chair. Go to the bathroom? Someone would push him into the bathroom in the chair. And then afterwards, after the whole day was done, the full day taping, then he went to the hospital and found out what was wrong.

He just couldn’t let us [down]. Like, “Oh my gosh, I got this program, I gotta run it. I gotta do it. I’m not going to let these people down.”

Amato: AICPA & CIMA CEO Barry Melancon is next, discussing the impact of Kess on the accounting profession.

Barry, Sid obviously meant a lot to the profession. He’s probably someone that’s tough to sum up in just a few words. But what would you say is the legacy of Sid Kess?

Melancon: I think the legacy of Sid Kess certainly revolves around continuing education. He was one of the stalwarts, even when continuing education first became a thing in the profession, a requirement in the profession. He was a leader in that area for tax, certainly in tax continuing education. And he did it in a way that connected with so many people. I know the younger generation, our profession, they don’t have that frame of reference on Sid Kess. But so many people who are older in the profession just learned so much from Sid. And he did it with a passion and a love for the importance of the profession.

Amato: Is it possible that a young Berry Melancon got some sort of CPE credit from a Sid Kess course?

Melancon: I knew Sid in the early 1980s. The honest answer to that, because I worked at the Louisiana CPA Society way back then – we had a strong relationship with Sid back then. I took courses with him, but it was more when I was in that role, not when I was still in public practice.

The thing about Sid was if he spoke to an audience of 150 people, he came back the next year, people would come up to him and talk to him, and he would remember them. He had an amazing memory. He would remember all the things about their families and the person, et cetera. He really connected. I was very privileged to have connected with Sid over the years as well, because he was just a gentle man and a passionate man about our profession. He always had great new ideas.

Amato: David Lifson mentioned that great memory. He couldn’t believe that Sid recalled an early meeting with him. The other thing you just touched on was ideas. That’s one thing I came away with in talking to people. He was just full of ideas. Well into his 90s, continuing to serve on conference committees, coming up with ways to make the events better.

Melancon: Well, it was an unlimited font of ideas, and he was such a personality. You hated to disappoint him, to not take up all of those ideas. The reality is you couldn’t take up all of those ideas because they were so many of them. But he had great ideas, and he loved the things that evolved in the profession. Clearly his ability to connect in teaching tax continuing education, and his font of ideas of how to do things differently and how to leverage them, wrapped in a big bow of his love for the profession, is really Sid Kess.

Amato: That love of the profession – there are a lot of people who are smart, but his ability to share and his desire to share just seemed unmatched really.

Melancon: He got a lot of energy from the people in the profession, the people he taught. I think that kept him young, that kept him motivated. He appreciated – we all have egos and Sid loved people telling him what they learned from him and how they applied it. He felt like he was having an impact much greater than he could have on his own. I really think that kept Sid young.

Amato: Now you’re joining me from London. I appreciate you taking the time. So many people have taken the time just to reach out just since our article has posted. But what would you say in closing are some of your memories, some of your stories of Sid Kess?

Melancon: Well, there’s some funny ones. Before the days of modern technology, when Sid would travel to teach a continuing education course, he would bring the entire library of whatever publication – CCH, RIA of the time, et cetera – and he would have it on the stage with him.

If he got a question, he wanted that fully accessible to him to be able to answer a question accurately for someone in the audience. That was quite an undertaking, because when he woud land at an airport, he would literally fly with those things. Then all had to be shipped with a taxi, et cetera, to wherever he was teaching a course. That was just the completeness and the attention to detail that Sid had.

I think the other is his just incredible ability to remember names and faces and stories. I think we all would wish for that in our lives, and some of us are a little bit better than others, but he was phenomenal. He was at the top of the class.