What is C3FM?

Customarily, certified public accountants (CPAs) have most often been the professionals who have ascended into public sector financial management and leadership positions. They were typically educated by schools of business where governmental accounting was usually an afterthought, a single course in most cases. Elsewhere, the financial focus of public administration programs has been primarily on budget formulation and execution, but the broader accounting discipline and evolving tenets of financial management have been ceded to the business schools.

Looming on the horizon is a dramatic talent turnover of leading professors, authors, and public financial management practitioners; the public financial management discipline's chief thinkers and doers are about to retire. Currently however, very few solutions address the specific problem of preparing public financial managers. Neither the business nor the public affairs/administration programs around the U.S. has a robust 21st century curriculum in which one might earn a certificate, bachelors, or masters degree in public financial management, the likely disciplines of which include: public sector accounting, finance, auditing, asset management, internal controls, information and communication systems, performance measurement/management, strategic sourcing (procurement) & supply chain management, cash & credit management, etc. Furthermore no cooperative of governments associations and universities exists to share a core curriculum teaching assets and delivery venues across a region.

Faced with the unfolding brain drain, public enterprises face several choices for developing replacement talent. A network of like-minded enterprises in the Western states have joined to explore this issue and now believe a cooperative choice is the most promising approach. This Cooperative for Contemporary Curricula In Financial Management (C3FM), made up of governments, public financial management associations, universities, and commercial interests, is now looking at the feasibility of a shared approach for quickly preparing sufficient numbers of public financial management leaders. The C3FM initiative now leads an effort to bring various institutions together to produce a common curriculum and share a set of teaching resources across the region. It aims at the specific task of providing tomorrow’s public financial managers with specific technical skills, a license to drive if you will.

The fundamental improvement C3FM offers over other cooperative solutions, apart from being the only solution addressing public financial management training, is leveraging technologies of distance learning to extend the reach of current core curricula beyond the traditional market boundary of member institutions. The technology to achieve this vision has already been successfully implemented in various states. Working together, we believe we can seize these opportunities and begin to reap the benefits of a shared approach to public financial management education.