Fuzzy Math (Opinion)

Perhaps we should’ve known Honkamp Krueger & Co. — at least as it initially was presented to us — was too good to be true.

We first heard about the firm in the spring from our sister publication in Little Rock. Honkamp, it seemed, did a little bit of everything.

Its list of services included accounting, auditing, wealth management, tax, consulting and on and on and on. And all of it from a fast-growing office in Bentonville.

OK, we thought, now this is the kind of story we like to write. Then we called Ryan Hauber.

Let’s just say things got fishy at that point. A request to visit the office for some standard interviews and picture-taking was met with a weird resistance.

The folks at Honkamp are so busy and travel so much, Hauber explained, it might be easier to conduct the interviews via Skype. And he would be happy to email us some photos.

So, after a fistful of frustrating attempts to meet somewhere in the middle, we decided to pass on the story.

Frankly, we had forgotten about Hauber and Honkamp until they showed up in the Sept. 19 issue of Arkansas Business. As has been well-documented by our friends there, Hauber reported 36 CPAs and 206 “other professionals” working in Honkamp’s Bentonville office, which rocketed it to No. 3 on the annual list of largest accounting firms.

As it turns out, Arkansas State Board of Public Accountancy executive director Jimmy Corley called AB with some news: He couldn’t find a single Arkansas-licensed CPA who listed Honkamp as their employer, though the firm itself was registered.

This led to a conversation between Hauber and an AB editor that served only to further muddy the picture. There was talk of “ambiguity” and a “misunderstanding.”

The end result was AB’s decision to remove Honkamp from its list. Regrettably, we didn’t learn that fact until after we’d gone to press with our own list.

That’s how it came to pass that one of our editors decided to drop by Honkamp’s Bentonville office.

Turns out that “office” is managed by Regus, a company that specializes in “virtual offices.” The nice lady at the front desk didn’t even know which company Mr. Hauber works for when we asked to see him.

That led to another phone conversation with Hauber, during which he objected to “probing” questions like, “Do any of your CPAs live in Arkansas?”

Hauber said Honkamp’s people are in such demand from competitors that such information isn’t made public, unlike, say, Wal-Mart, which last time we checked, doesn’t hide the identity or size of its work force. Frankly, Hauber seemed perturbed that anyone would question anything about Honkamp.

He said Honkamp does business in Bentonville, but “how we do it is irrelevant.”

Unfortunately for Mr. Hauber, that’s for us to decide. Perhaps he’ll take solace in the fact that while Honkamp’s no longer among our ranking of the area’s largest accounting firms list, he’s all alone at the top of another list.