Accountant, Global Tax Operations Leader of Asia Pacific, GE

>> My name's James Morrison. I am retired. I've been, my last position was tax operation leader for Asian Pacific, working for GE Capital. I retired two years ago. On a daily basis we were looking at tax accounts, tax calculations, tax projections, tax returns, obviously. Not just for the U.S., but tax returns overseas, as well. Because of being Asia Pacific, encompassed Australia to China, and, New Zealand to India, so fairly large region. And, yeah, we were concerned with all the tax activities that were going on, on a daily basis. As the operational part of this focused on making sure the accounting, the tax accounting was working correctly. My schedule would be like. I got up, left home, probably about six a.m. to get to the office about six forty. I tried to miss the heavy traffic. Got in to the office. I'd be on conference calls, generally from seven a.m. to nine a.m. Then I'd be sitting down talking with my direct reports that are in the country. They weren't in the same place I was, they were other places, so we'd have calls. Then after noon, when the Australia folks came in to their places, we'd have conference calls with Australia, to talk about what was going on, or with Japan, to talk about what was going on. And, I traveled about 30 percent of the time. So, I spent a good bit of my time in the Asia region. Japan, you know, generally two week trips too. Because when you're traveling that far, a one week trip is not cost efficient. You've got to go for at least a couple weeks. You had to be flexible. You had to be willing to take calls at odd hours. Because, of course, since they are generally 12 to 16 hour time difference. So, they're 12 to 16 hours ahead of us. As we're getting ready to go to bed, they're coming in to work, normally. So, I would be taking conference calls or calls from people, at eight, nine, ten o'clock at night, depending on what was going on at the time. At closing time, because we went through quarterly closes, and we had to be active in that, to make sure the tax provisions were correct, on a quarterly basis. I'd take calls, I could take a midnight call, depending on what was going on. If we had an emergency, you had to be on call. But, it wasn't just phone calls, we also IM'd, using computers, which helped. I mean, IM's minimized some of the calls, but the face to face calls, and then, face to face meetings, were very important when you're dealing with other cultures, and other languages.