Mark Matulich brings 24 years of experience as an accountant and as an FBI investigator to his new position as Director of Finance and Administration of the Rancho Murieta Community Services District (CSD).

RANCHO MURIETA, CA (MPG) - Mark Matulich brings 25 years of experience as an accountant and as an FBI investigator to his new position of  Director of Finance and Administration at the Rancho Murieta Community Services District (CSD). He came on board Oct. 30.

After graduating from college, Matulich worked as an auditor and a controller for 11 years in Sacramento, as a white-collar fraud investigator for the FBI for 12 years, mostly in San Francisco, and as an accountant for the past two years, initially as the chief financial officer for a heath care company in the Bay Area and more recently in his new CSD position.

“I’ve always loved my career in accounting,” Matulich said. “Even in the bureau, I worked hard to get assigned to a white-collar crime squad so I could leverage my background in accounting and finance.”

To Matulich, there is always an answer with accounting. “It might take a while to dig in, to move numbers around, and to figure things out,” he said. “But there is always an answer.”

Matulich grew up in Sacramento, attended McClatchy High School for two years, graduated from high school in Auburn, but returned to Sacramento to attend college. He worked Raley’s for seven years while in high school and college.

Matulich thought he would major in business when he enrolled in Sacramento City College. To meet the general requirements, he took an accounting class in which the professor showed videos of CPAs working in different scenarios. “This wasn’t my stereotypical image of an accountant squirreled away in a dark, little room,” he said. “It clicked. I thought: I can do this.”

Matulich graduated from California State University Sacramento (Sac State) in 1999 with a bachelor of science in business administration with a specialization in accountancy.

His first job after college was with Burnett & Company LLP, which is a public accounting firm in Rancho Cordova. Private companies and entities like CSD hire public accounting firms to issue audit reports on their financial statements and to prepare their taxes.  Matulich leaned towards auditing because he was interested in how businesses work. But he also had the opportunity to work on tax returns for his clients. It was during his time with Burnett that he became a CPA.

After a few years, he had to decide whether he would go after a partner track with a public accounting firm or try private industry. A friend told him about an opening for an internal auditor at McClatchy Newspapers. “I thought this would be a good way to test out and learn private industry accounting,” he said.

He was part of the audit team that worked at McClatchy newspapers across the country for several months in 2003. But when an assistant controller position came up at the Sacramento Bee, he took it. “I was really fortunate to have a boss that taught me a lot, such as how to work with other departments that could care less about what the accounting department is doing,” he said.

In 2006, he decided to step up to a position as the controller for University Enterprises. It is a division of Sac State that operates business functions such as the bookstore, food services, and even a temporary student employment agency. He also began work on a master’s degree simultaneously but didn’t finish because of a career change.

It came about after he and his wife were having dinner with another couple, and the husband told Matulich he had listed him as a reference on his FBI application. Matulich decided to apply himself.

After many interviews and tests, the FBI hired Matulich and sent him to Quantico for 21 weeks of training to become a special agent. “I thought I would go on this adventure see where it would take me,” Matulich said.

The image shows a leadership medal for investigative work awarded to Matulich by FBI Director James Comey in 2016.

After finishing the academy in 2010, Matulich couldn’t request an assignment to the Sacramento FBI office but “lucked out” in being sent to the large San Francisco office. He used his background in accounting and finance to investigate complex financial frauds and other criminal activity through document research, interviews and other sophisticated techniques.

He also served as the crisis management coordinator with multiple federal, state, and local agencies to prepare for critical incidents and large-scale operations. In 2016, his office successfully nominated him for the FBI Director’s Leadership Medal for leading the investigation of a major case.

Between 2016 and 2018, Matulich took an 18-month temporary assignment at the Economic Crimes Unit in Washington D. C. He provided program support to 13 field offices such as securing them needed funding or the permission for an investigation. He also organized a weeklong conference for 400 special agents and forensic accountants who needed continuing education to maintain their CPAs. Another part of the job was preparing and delivering talks and training programs about complex financial crimes. He also served as the acting unit chief with oversight for the 56 field offices during a transition between unit chiefs.

Back in the San Francisco office, Matulich began to realize that he couldn’t afford to retire at the FBI’s mandatory age of 57 unless he could be promoted to higher, more lucrative positions. That would require several transfers around the country including back to Washington D.C. That wasn’t a good fit.

Matulich put out some feelers and found a position as the chief financial officer for Acadia Healthcare, which provides high-end, drug and alcohol treatment in the Bay Area. “I thought it would be a good move for me and my family to go back to the private sector and recharge my accounting career,” he said.

Then a friend told him about the CSD opening. The job looked very interesting when he pulled up the posting. Another plus was the location in Sacramento so he could be close to family. “This also looked like a place where I could work for 15 years and retire without having to worry about bouncing around or switching jobs,” he said.

Matulich is happy that General Manager Mimi Morris hired him.  “Mimi is great to work with,” he said. “She’s got a really good vision for CSD, and she is working super hard to get everything cleaned up.”

There are times when Matulich, Morris, and accountant Chris Funakoshi stay late. “A couple of weeks ago she cooked some pizzas for us, and we were here until 8 or 9 p.m. just working through some stuff,” he said. “So it is a good, collaborative working environment. Everyone wants to see CSD run smoothly.”

Matulich is married and has a 15-year-old daughter and a 9-year-old Beagle. He enjoys attending his daughter’s softball games and cross-country matches, walking the dog, and lifting some weights. His favorite pastime is barbecuing for friends and family. He even fixed Christmas dinner this year.

“I joke all the time that I am going to find a surplus, 1,000-gallon propane tank, build my own giant smoker, and take it around on a trailer on the weekends,” he said.