Hans Kasper, MS-CPA, PSBiography
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Hans has been a Certified
Public Accountant since 1974, first in Illinois and, since 1985, in
Washington.
He
graduated from While living in Illinois, he worked in the Internal Revenue Service as a corporate auditor (IRS stories), in a mid-sized CPA firm as a tax accountant, in a large school district as a non-profit accountant, and as a controller in the household goods moving industry. Since moving to Washington in 1981, Hans has worked as a controller at Stoneway Electric in Seattle and as a controller in a software company. In January 1991, he started his own CPA firm which has now grown to 900 customers ranging from individual tax clients and small business owners to larger corporations. He is also a member of the Washington CPA society. Hans has written several published articles and has authored several books on accounting and business.
I grew up on the south suburban side of Chicago. My father, who was born in 1902 in Germany and came to America in 1923, did not go to school beyond the ninth grade. My mother, who was born in 1908, was raised in an iron ore mining town in northern Minnesota and did not go the school beyond the sixth grade. They were not well educated people, but they did work hard and were honest. The sociologists would have described us as middle or upper-lower class. My mother died when I was 12 from a three-year struggle with cancer. Prior to that time, she worked a full-time job. I spent most of my time in day care (which was not as good as it is today) and little attention was paid to my education. After my mother died, I was on my own and still did not learn. When I turned eighteen, I could not read or write above the fourth or fifth grade level. The teachers had just passed me along. I was a good kid, but stupid. I entered college by way of a music scholarship. With about eight hours of help from another student, I began teaching myself to read and write. I practiced and practiced, studied and studied, read and re-read, and memorized and re-memorized my lessons seven days a week. The only thing I had going for me was that I had a naturally-high math aptitude. Four years later, at age 22, I graduated from college, entered a masters level program, and began teaching elementary and intermediate accounting at the university. I wasn't one of those rich college students who could afford pizza or beer. One summer, I worked in a Tootsie Roll factory in 90 degree heat twelve hours a day, six days a week for $1.75 per hour (up to two of those hours were spent in a room that was 130 degrees). I remember watching guys lose fingers in the machines. Saturdays were especially difficult as they would bring in drunks from skid row to work with me. At the university, I had a job on the weekends as a janitor cleaning liquor-induced vomit off of dorm bathroom floors for $1.45 per hour plus all the food I could eat in the cafeteria. Two years after graduation, I passed the CPA exam on my first try which was not bad since only 6% of the applicants nationwide do that. I couldn't afford one of those fancy CPA exam review courses, so I bought the books and studied an hour on the train in the morning, an hour on the train at night, two hours at night at home, and four hours each day on the weekends for six months to take the exam. I count this to be a total of 730 hours of study time over six months (28 hours per week) in addition to working a full-time job of 40 hours per week.
So when people
say to me, I can't learn this or do that (unless they have a
learning disability), I say to them, "YA HAVE TA GOTTA WANNA." I believe that I am a good example of that. This
page was last updated on
05/13/2010 |
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