SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : REPORTS FORM THE FIELD : And the Winner Is. . .an Accountant

Tom Cruise doesn’t know. Dustin Hoffman doesn’t know. Meryl Streep doesn’t know.

But accountant Frank Johnson will know who has won this year’s Academy Awards two days before he strides onstage with a fistful of sealed envelopes later this month.

Johnson, the partner in charge of Price Waterhouse’s entertainment group, has been the accountant responsible for tallying the Oscar ballots for the last 14 years. He and a single colleague are the only two people with advance information of just what names will be inside the envelopes they hand to the tuxedo- and evening gown-garbed celebrity presenters who will announce the results to a worldwide TV audience.

“It’s kind of fun to know a secret the rest of the world wants to know,” Johnson said. “And since my wife and I are movie fans, this job is particularly enjoyable.”

To outsiders, the life of an accountant may seem exceedingly dull. Branded as “bean counters,” accountants are generally known for slogging through page after page of numbers, not for hobnobbing with public figures.

Yet the stereotype can be deceiving. While some accountants specialize in tax preparation or estate planning, others monitor the goings on at breweries, banks or major league baseball stadiums. Accountants also play key, behind-the-scenes roles in law enforcement and in private investigations.

Valued for their broad financial experience and intimate knowledge of the firms they advise, they even are picked sometimes to run well-known American companies.

Take Chuck Schmidt, a former certified public accountant appointed chief executive of the Detroit Lions football team early this year. “For all those bean counters out there,” he told reporters, “I want to say, ‘Yo, we made it.’ ”

More typical, of course, are accountants who spend their time checking the accuracy of financial records. A boring pursuit? Well, it can occasionally lead them to places off limits to the public. In Las Vegas, Steve Comer supervises chip counting--not bean counting--at casinos, including Caesars Palace and Circus Circus.

“We’re required to go through cash counts in the cages where all the money is . . . to determine that the company has followed good procedures and is complying with state regulations,” said Comer, a partner in charge of the Las Vegas office of Arthur Andersen and Co.

Indeed, not all accountants sit behind the same desk for decades. With the increasingly international flavor of business, employees of leading accounting firms are dispatched to locales as far off as Tokyo and Paris to inspect factories or examine ledgers.

Yet the ultimate field work for accountants takes place on American shores.

More than 1,250 FBI special agents--roughly one-eighth of the bureau’s field staff of agents--hold accounting degrees.

“Historically, we like accountants and attorneys,” said FBI spokesman Fred Reagan. “That’s been true since the FBI was established. . . . They’re hired as regular agents and their lives sometimes become more exciting than that of the general CPA.”

In addition to pens and calculators, Reagan explained, “they carry a badge, a sidearm and handcuffs.”

With the mushrooming national savings and loan scandal, the FBI recently received authorization to hire 150 additional agents with accounting degrees. The annual starting pay is $30,000.

In general, starting pay for accountants at medium and large public accounting firms begins at about $25,000 nationwide, according to a 1990 salary survey by Robert Half International Inc. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates there are 945,000 accounting and auditing jobs in the nation, about one-third held by CPAs.

“You make a good living and you move along at a fairly good pace,” said Avedick Poladian, managing partner for the Arthur Andersen office in Los Angeles. “It also offers people at a fairly young age the opportunity to take on a good amount of responsibility.”

“We principally hire people right out of college with undergraduate degrees in accounting,” he continued. “The attrition rate in public accounting is fairly high. A lot of people get offers from their clients because they demonstrate strong expertise, so they get snatched up. . . . The good news is we have a strong alumni network, which in many cases is our best source of new business.”

Merton Alperin, a longtime CPA and member of the Massachusetts State Board of Accountancy, acknowledges that “a lot of (accounting) is drudge work, don’t kid yourself.”

But he adds that the profession is generally more people-oriented than the public might realize.

“It’s a business where you have a lot of human relationships. You’re dealing with people all the time. . . . You become a psychiatrist and a psychologist with certain clients. . . . They call the doctor if they are sick, but otherwise they call their accountants. He’s the business confidante . . . part of the team.”

While accounting may never boast the sex appeal of some professions--after all, there is no discernible public demand for a TV series called “L.A. Accounting”--the field appears to be one that is less tainted than many in regard to such issues as trust and respect.

One factor may be the annual Academy Awards broadcast, where presenters painstakingly point out the strict secrecy employed by Price Waterhouse.

Each year, six accountants help count the ballots that members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have mailed in. Johnson and an associate summarize the final tallies. On awards night, the pair carry separate stacks of envelopes to the ceremony, in case one of them gets delayed for an unforeseen reason.

And Johnson guarantees this: The winners’ names do not leak. “It’s part of our work to keep confidences and hold inside information secure. The ability to keep a secret and manage the process without any hitch for so many years is good for the business.”