Russ:  This is the PKF Texas Entrepreneur’s Playbook.  I’m Russ Capper, this week’s guest host, and I’m here once again with Brian Baumler, Senior Vice President with Joint Venture Strategic Advisors and an audit director with PKF Texas; Brian, welcome back to the Playbook.

Brian:  Thanks so much Russ, really appreciate being here.

Russ:  You bet.  So on this advising of joint ventures you mentioned earlier that you mostly come in for the non-operating partner because they kind of want to check out the operating partner, right?

Brian:  Absolutely, that’s typically what happens.

Russ:  So when you come in and do it are you really only looking at it from their perspective and not the operating partner’s?

Brian:  That’s a great question.  Most often they are our engagement client so we’re looking out for their best interest, but a lot of times the findings that we do find benefit really all parties.  Definitely if we have findings the other non-operating partners do participate in those findings, but secondarily there can be examples where it benefits all parties.  A really good example of that was one of our joint venture clients where we discovered that there were certain taxes that weren’t being imposed by their vendors and because of that there were jurisdictions that didn’t have those taxes in place.  So because of that they were able to get refunds that benefitted all parties to the arrangement.

Russ:  Wow win/win.

Brian:  Absolutely.

Russ:  If you come in and you’re representing a non-operating partner does the operating partner sometimes also engage an outside service to help them?

Brian:  Well when we’re actually performing under the right of joint venture audit most operators – not all, but most operators – have teams of people that help with that service if you will from the perspective of making sure that we’re taken care of because the last thing I think they would want is to be there any longer than we need to and of course we want those audits to be efficient.

Russ:  Great.  Well I really appreciate this.

Brian:  Absolutely, thank you so much.

Russ:  You bet.  For more about joint venture services visit JVSA.com.  This has been another Thought Leader production brought to you by PKF Texas Entrepreneur’s Playbook.