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Green Building Good for Consultants

Consultants discuss their necessity.

By Debra Hazel | Updated on June 20, 2008

As brownfield redevelopment proliferates and interest in green building increases, one trend has become clear: it’s a good time to be an environmental consultant. New accounting rules published by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) regarding the due diligence in transactions of distressed properties–as well as the growing complexity of green technology and standards–will lead to growing reliance on outside experts, the consultants themselves say.

A December 2007 revision of Financial Accounting Statement No. 141 requires that a buyer recognize all assets and liabilities, including environmental liabilities, in a transaction at fair value. The new rules arose from the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which established new or enhanced financial reporting standards in the wake of major corporate scandals including the collapse of Enron.

“The accounting standards board saw this as a way of getting around liability, making it much more difficult to get out of reporting liabilities,” David Robinson, vice president of remedial services for The Whitman Co.–an East Brunswick, N.J.-based environmental engineering and management firm–says to GlobeSt.com. Robinson, with Edward Sullivan, a Whitman project manager, has written on the effect of these changes on the transaction process. Outside experts, they say, will need to provide detailed analyses regarding the need for environmental investigations or remediations, the technologies to achieve it, relationships with the regulators, range of potential outcomes, the “expected value” of the liability and even the possibility of natural resource damages.

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