Jim Butler:  

cut. I transitioned into accounting career by helping prepare taxes for an accountant that I met at the Black Angus. Unable to get an accounting job with one of the Big-8 (now Big-4) because of my mediocre accounting grades, I started my accounting career in 1982 with Kenneth L. Wall and Co. in the Westin Building in downtown Seattle. It was a small 6-8 person firm where I performed a variety of tax and accounting services. What a different world it was then -- actually hand writing entries in black and red into ledgers, computers that were barely glorified typewriters and handwriting tax return entries onto forms that had to be shipped out to processing centers and returned days later. In the fall of 1984, my wife Kathy was transferred from the Washington State Library in Olympia to a satellite branch just outside of Spokane. I moved east as well and caught on with Walther-Shriver & Associates, another 6-8 person accounting firm. After doing a variety of compilation, review, audit and tax work for two years, I was looking for more specialization and career growth and joined the Coopers & Lybrand Tax Department in Spokane in December 1986. I jumped into the C&L tax world just as the technology revolution was starting to hit the workplace. We did a lot of automation as I worked on a variety of individual and corporate tax work, with a specialization on corporate work. After a couple of years, I aggressively pursued the opportunity to participate in an 18-month rotation program in Washington D.C. and was ultimately assigned to the National Tax office in July 1990. I learned a great deal and made some great friends while working at C&L National Tax; plus our family loved it in Arlington. As the end of my 18-month term was approaching, C&L waffled, then revoked, then required I move back to the Spokane C&L office. Sensing a complete lack of opportunity, I went on a crash job search and found a job with Ernst & Young that I started in December 1991 after resigning from C&L on my 5 year anniversary. I stayed at E&Y from 1991 to Spring 1995, specializing in corporate high-tech, government contractor clients. I worked with countless good people at E&Y, many of which I stay in contract with today. After deciding not to pursue the partner track, I started looking for my first accounting job outside public accounting in late 1994. In Spring 1995, I joined Sallie Mae as the Director of Tax, later to become the VP-Tax. At Sallie Mae, I managed a group of 6+ tax professionals. We worked through the transition of Sallie Mae from a government sponsored entity to a private entity and tackled many interesting issues. After four years of saving money for Sallie Mae, the Tax Department fell victim to the outsourcing craze of the late 1990s in September 1999 and I was unemployed. After spending many an hour surfing the net, networking by phone and going on interviews, I caught on with the fledgling XM Satellite Radio as the Director of Tax in May 2000. Taking XM from an idea to an operating business has been a tremendous learning experience. I've been fortunate to work with an outstanding tax team that has been a leader in XM's finance team.