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June 9, 2023

When accounting goes unaccounted for

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Friday Footnotes: PwC’s Head of Reputation Quits; KPMG’s New Commercial; EY Split Still on the Menu | 6.9.23 EY’s New Payroll Chatbot Just Has to Be Slightly Less Sucky Than HR to Be a Success Former Partner Who Got His Says Aussie Government Should Stop Using Outside Consultants Finally Having Something to Roast Them About, KPMG CEO Takes This Opportunity to Talk Sh*t About PwC Professor Accuses Professional Accountant Body of Hoarding Fines Like Smaug Hoards Gold

achievers

CPA Exam

Here Are Your 2014 Elijah Watt Sells Winners

by Caleb Newquist

Fifty-nine1 lucky boys and girls managed to score 95.50 across the board and on the first try so they all take home a trophy or whatever. As you may recall, we learned last year that in 2011 the Board of Examiners decided to standardize the EWS winning score at 95.50 which accounts for the boom in number of […]

CPA Exam

Let’s Look at Some Random CPA Exam Statistics From California Colleges

by Adrienne Gonzalez

This post comes courtesy of a reader request. If you would like specific CPA exam statistics, shoot me an email and I'll dig through the candidate performance book for you so you don't have to waste $90 on it yourself. You're welcome. What are the top California schools for CPA exam performance (based on 2010 […]

PwC

(UPDATE) This PwC Senior Associate Is One of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Finance and You Are Not

by Caleb Newquist

His name is Zack Capozzi, he went to Notre Dame (John Veihmeyer wanted this kid bad) and "is developing new business initiative for PwC using predictive analytics." He was a domer from 2004 – 2008, majoring in computer science, according to his LinkedIn profile (conveniently provided by Forbes), joining PwC's Chicago office in '08. Zack's Facebook page (also […]

Career Center

How a Homeless High School Dropout Became an Accountant

by Adrienne Gonzalez

Remember the story of the 48-year-old woman who took 19 years to get her bachelor’s in accounting? This is sort of like that except today’s protagonist was the family black sheep, a high school dropout, and lived out of her car.

29-year-old Jennifer Brown dropped out of Clackamas High (OR) her freshman year, spent some months in a group home and alternative school and spent the next several years working crappy jobs, alternating between her then-boyfriend’s house and sleeping in her car. By the time she was 25, she was working at a grocery store and realized she loved keeping the store’s books.

At 25, she got married and quit her job at the grocery store to pursue her educational dreams, enrolling full-time at a community college in San Diego. It took her three semesters before she could take math classes for credit, being placed in remedial math classes until she could be caught up.

Through the support of tutors and professors, she managed to maintain a 4.0 for two semesters before the family moved to Portland to be with her husband’s father, who was dying of bone cancer. From there, she attended Clackamas and Mt. Hood community colleges and Clark College in Vancouver to put together the classes required to transfer to the University of Portland’s accounting program. She kept up a 3.9 GPA, nailing “As” in classes like business calculus, statistics and decision modeling.

Brown will graduate from the University of Portland on May 8th with a bachelor’s in business administration. From there, she’s off to the University of Southern California, presumably for her Masters in accounting. She’s interned at Deloitte and mentored high school students like herself, at risk of dropping out or otherwise veering off the path.

Eventually, she wants to earn a doctorate degree and be a forensic and fraud auditor for the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Commence to calling her an underachiever in the comments, as is your wont, dear Going Concern readers.

As Oregon begins the college graduation season, nontraditional students take a bow [OregonLive]