Gies ACCY Update - April 2023

ACCY Update

From the Department Head

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

I continue to be inspired and humbled by the way our students, faculty, and alumni work together to keep our Department of Accountancy at the forefront of business education.

In this issue of ACCY Update, we share many ways our community embraces the College’s commitments to access, excellence, and innovation in how we do business and teach business.

We appreciate our engaging alumni who continue to give back. They support our vision by generously investing in our faculty, students, and programs. They also serve on our advisory boards, helping us shape the curriculum for the next generation of business leaders.

We continue to provide life-changing access and inclusion through the University of Illinois Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program. This free tax service targets those in need in our community and provides Gies students a hands-on learning experience. Our new accounting certificates create an affordable, targeted way for learners to enhance their skills. They also increase accessibility by offering a flexible way to earn the credentials that can advance careers.

And we celebrate the excellence of our faculty – including those who are no longer with us but remain an inspiration. In this issue, we remember our friend and colleague, Jessen Hobson, and highlight how the College and our alumni are paying tribute to Art Wyatt, a beloved professor and pioneer in the field.

We appreciate you and your enthusiastic support of innovative accounting research and curriculum at Illinois. Together, we continue to build on our reputation as one of the most respected, forward-thinking accountancy departments in the world.

Sincerely,

Michael Donohoe Head, Department of Accountancy PwC Faculty Fellow and RC Evans Data Analytics Scholar

“We appreciate our engaging alumni who continue to give back. They support our vision by generously investing in our faculty, students, and programs.”

Wyatt honored with alumni pledge drive, symposium

The legacy of Art Wyatt (1927-2017), one of Gies’ beloved professors and a pioneer in the field of accounting, continues to grow. Wyatt served two long tenures at Illinois, sandwiched between an illustrious career with Arthur Andersen & Co.

Wyatt, who received his bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD degrees from Illinois, deeply inspired the lives of countless undergraduate and graduate Gies students, taking on the roles of teacher, role model, friend, and counselor.

To recognize Wyatt’s impact on them, Doug Dossey (ACCY ’95) is asking fellow alumni to join him in contributing to a 1:1 matching fund up to $250,000. The goal is to use the combined donations from others, who were also mentored by Wyatt, to name a space in his honor. This matching fund is part of a larger gift from Dossey and his wife, Kathrin Dellago, toward the College’s new building, named Steven S. Wymer Hall, pending Board of Trustees approval.

“Art Wyatt had style and substance. When he walked into the classroom, he was immediately recognizable as a businessman – he dressed differently and acted differently. I was instantly impressed,” said Dossey, founder and managing partner

“Art helped me understand and enter a world that a kid from Eureka (IL) couldn’t imagine. And he taught me by example

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of San Francisco-based Tensile Capital Management. “Art helped me understand and enter a world that a kid from Eureka (IL) couldn’t imagine. And he taught me by example how valuable and rewarding it is to give back.”

The Department of Accountancy is also recognizing Wyatt’s dedication to nurturing young talent by renaming its spring research forum the Arthur R. Wyatt Young Scholars Symposium. Since its inception in 2014, this event allows promising professors from the world’s finest universities to present their research and have senior professors act as discussants.

“Art Wyatt’s unique vision for the future of accountancy education was

both extraordinary and groundbreaking, so it was a natural fit to honor him,” said Michael Donohoe, head of the Department of Accountancy. “He was someone who always had a watchful eye on young people, offering advice and counsel. We think he’d appreciate that mentorship at Gies extends to nurturing the next generation of scholars in our field.”

The symposium is one of the accountancy department’s signature events. Its unique, interactive format is unlike all others and aligns its mission to open new frontiers for innovative teaching and research.

“In our Department of Accountancy, intellectual curiosity, academic rigor, and perseverance are highly valued,” said Jeffrey R. Brown, dean and Josef and Margot Lakonishok Professor in Business. “We’re committed to supporting the efforts of junior scholars by providing them with an opportunity to benefit from the wisdom of senior scholars, who themselves were beneficiaries of the insights of those who came before them.”

Read more about Wyatt’s career and contributions to Gies College of Business and reach out to Angie Price (angie1@illinois.edu) to learn more about contributing to the Art Wyatt fund.

how valuable and rewarding it is to give back.

DOUG DOSSEY TENSILE CAPITAL MANAGEMENT

McDonald’s exec shares career path, advice

Pam Lins’ career is a vivid example of why accounting is the language of business.

“Once you understand it, it’s transferrable to many aspects of business and opens many doors,” said Lins (ACCY ’07, MAS ’08), who began her career at Deloitte before joining McDonald’s, where she is now senior director of global financial planning, analysis, and reporting.

“I’m so thankful I started my career at Deloitte. It’s where I learned how to be a professional and got exposure to several types of clients,” she said. “Ultimately, I decided I wanted to transition to industry and feel a sense of ownership, belonging, and accountability for driving results within one organization.”

McDonald’s has offered Lins a broad range of finance and accounting opportunities. During her 10 years with the Golden Arches, she has spent time across a wide range of financial disciplines in the US business unit and at the global corporate level.

In the US, Lins has worked directly with franchisees while simultaneously having accountability for a regional P&L of 700+ restaurants. She also held the role of CFO and finance director for the US company-owned restaurant portfolio.

Lins said during challenging times, she leans on advice from one of her favorite professors, A. Rashad Abdel-khalik, who taught her how to think outside of the box and look at problems from different angles. She now applies those skills to her current position overseeing McDonald’s global financial planning analysis as well as its accounting and reporting teams.

“We’re responsible for forecasting where the business is headed and working with investor relations to craft messaging to Wall Street about our performance,” she said. “We also work with the audit teams to pull together SEC filings, earning releases, and 10-K reports. Our team is responsible for much of the information that tells the story of McDonald’s.”

Lins hopes to eventually become a CFO or corporate controller so that she can continue to lead big teams and develop others, working together to expand their influence on a company and drive results.

Accounting was a natural fit for Lins. Her older brother and parents are Gies Business graduates, and she grew up attending Illini football and basketball games. But the biggest draw of those games was the Illinettes dance team.

“I grew up dancing, and becoming an Illinette was a dream of mine,” said Lins, who earned a spot on the team four years during her time on campus. “Balancing the 20-hour-a-week commitment for practices and game days with my academics and social activities – down to 30-minute increments – laid the groundwork for how I approach my busy schedule today. I remember one week in which I had three exams, was up at 6 am on Saturday for all-day football game day performances, and also had my family in town for Dad’s Day – balancing all those activities was a great learning experience (although I did not realize it at the time).”

Instead of entering the workforce with her undergraduate degree, Lins took a

different approach. She said it was a tough decision but decided to spend an additional year on campus earning her master’s degree in accountancy while simultaneously prepping for and taking the CPA exam.

“Once you start working, life gets busy, so I took advantage of this expedited graduate track at Gies to add these credentials immediately instead of waiting a few years to get an MBA or another advanced degree,” Lins said.

Lins had interned with McDonald’s between her junior and senior years of undergrad and then secured an internship at Deloitte the following summer. She joined Deloitte full-time in 2008 as an audit associate and was able to focus solely on beginning her career without the distraction of the CPA exam.

Lins continues to stay connected to the University as a member of the Department of Accountancy Advisory Board and the University of Illinois Alumni Association Finance Committee. She also visits campus regularly to speak with students, often at the Accounting Leadership Academy.

“I share that no career choice has to be permanent. Expect your career to take a bunch of twists and turns,” she said. “The most successful young staff I work with are naturally curious people. Being successful is not about having all the right answers, it’s really about asking the right questions, being open-minded, and continuously learning from others.”

“I share that no career choice has to be permanent. Expect your career to take a bunch of twists and turns. The most successful young staff I work with are naturally curious people.”

Remembering our colleague and friend

Professor Jessen Hobson, a talented teacher and scholar, a committed colleague, and a devoted husband and father, passed away suddenly in January after suffering a medical emergency. He was 49 years old.

When he joined the Department of Accountancy in 2009, Jessen brought a deep curiosity and enthusiasm for fostering innovation in research and teaching. He was a colleague who had an endless supply of new ideas for impacting the accounting profession through cutting-edge research, for engaging Gies learners through groundbreaking curricular initiatives, and for advancing the research of his colleagues through laboratory support. Jessen had a tireless work ethic and a collaborative spirit that encouraged discovery.

Throughout his 13 years as a valued faculty member, Jessen embraced the College’s spirit of innovation and advanced it. In 2020, he was named the director of the University of Illinois-Deloitte Foundation Center for Business Analytics, which develops innovative, in-demand courses in the analytics field and makes them widely accessible. He often lauded the work of Gies colleagues, who he said did so much to advance the Center’s tradition

At Gies, we were privileged to be the beneficiaries of Jessen’s generous commitment to his students and colleagues. His work enriched our community and our profession, and his kind spirit made our College a better place.

of revolutionary data analytics education. Jessen was instrumental in these efforts as well, not only in his work with the Center but through his commitment to integrating data analytics across the accounting curriculum and his leadership in establishing two new interdisciplinary undergraduate degrees with a data science focus – Accountancy + Data Science and Finance + Data Science.

In addition, Jessen was a co-director of the Gies Behavioral Research Lab, a unique experimental lab that provides research study implementation support for faculty across the College. Jessen took pride in this collaborative and community-building effort, which was years in the making, for its ability to benefit the profession by supporting the innovative research

of the accounting faculty and to create opportunities for students, alumni, online learners, and community members to participate in top accounting research studies.

While leading these groundbreaking College and departmental initiatives, Jessen was still able to distinguish himself as a scholar and teacher. His award-winning research was published in the world’s top accounting journals and made an impact on the profession. In addition, he was widely recognized for his exemplary teaching. The American Accounting Association named Jessen a winner of the 2021 Innovation in Accounting Education Award and the 2020 Outstanding Dissertation Chair Award. In 2020, he also earned the Provost’s Campus Distinguished Promotion Award for extraordinary contributions in teaching, service, and impact of research. He was on the University’s List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students since 2012.

At Gies, we were privileged to be the beneficiaries of Jessen’s generous commitment to his students and colleagues. His work enriched our community and our profession, and his kind spirit made our College a better place.

Initiatives Create Life-Changing Access

New ACCY certificates build skills

This fall, students and professionals began pursuing three new graduate certificates in accountancy that are designed to enhance the pipeline of professionals who are CPA ready and to enrich their understanding of data analytics.

• CPA Pathways enhances technical knowledge and skills in financial accounting, taxation, and accounting data analytics, and prepares learners to sit for and pass the CPA exam.

• The Accounting Data Analytics certificate targets those in a managerial role looking to expand their understanding of data analytics.

• Accountancy Foundations is designed for students who want to launch or advance their professional accounting careers.

The certificates offer a targeted way to bridge the gap between the 120 hours required to earn an undergraduate accountancy degree and the 150 hours needed to sit for the CPA exam.

“It’s not always emphasized in first-job interviews that it’s hard to advance at a public accounting firm without a CPA license. With 70 percent of current CPAs expected to retire in the next 15 years, those with the right credentials will have plenty of opportunity to advance their careers,” said Nerissa Brown, associate dean of graduate programs.

“Unless an undergrad has already earned multiple AP credits when they come to campus, they are left short of the credits needed to become a CPA,” said Brown, who added this becomes a barrier for underrepresented minority and first-generation students who have fewer financial resources to take the extra time and money to earn a 30-hour graduate degree in accountancy.

The transcripted credentials are the first offered by the University. Each includes 12 credit hours of coursework, takes eight months or more to complete, and costs from $5,960 to $10,200. Coursework is stackable, providing a new pathway to a graduate degree in accountancy or an iMBA. And because these are for credit, learners may be eligible for loans or tuition reimbursement from their employer.

“Professionals today need to be continuously learning – upskilling – and they need it at a time, place, and pace that suits their needs,” said Michael Donohoe, head of the Department of Accountancy. “In the same way that a full degree signals to the world that you’ve mastered a broad body of knowledge, these graduate certificates show that you’ve learned a specific, in-demand skill that can set you apart from the competition.”

Donohoe added that the decision to offer certificates aknowledges that not everyone wants to pursue a full degree.

“We’re surrounded by new technology and innovation. These certificates create a way to teach learners in a nontraditional way,” Donohoe said. “We’re offering something of value for their careers in a format and at a price point that’s attractive to working professionals. You can earn the credentials you need to get promoted without relocating your family, life, and job for a one-year, on-campus program.”

To learn more about accounting certificates, visit our website

Community outreach with VITA

Encouraging her students to engage with the local community is one of the many ways Mandi Alt, Gies instructor of accountancy, makes a big impact on their lives.

This tax season, Alt is once again leading the University of Illinois’ Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program, which offers free tax assistance to taxpayers who have low incomes, are elderly, have disabilities, or speak limited English. She is partnering with seven faculty members to oversee 40 students preparing and filing tax returns.

“Particularly for our international students who are so far away from home, this program creates a way to connect and be of service helping other families,” said Alt, who recently earned an excellence in undergraduate teaching award from the University.

For Destiny Manh, a senior who plans to pursue a master’s in accountancy this fall, this experience has allowed her to practice her soft skills.

“I’m getting experience with how to communicate with clients,” Manh said. “It sometimes takes a couple of times to explain a concept or tax rule, and with this type of community outreach, it’s important to show kindness and patience as I teach them about the impact of tax planning and filing.”

It is the second year VITA has received a grant from the IRS to assist with administrative tasks, so students and faculty members can focus on expanding the program’s reach.

Alt said VITA assists people from a wide range of circumstances, including a group of Afghan refugees who relocated to Urbana in late 2021, got jobs in 2022, and need to file taxes this spring.

“Working with the refugee center’s interpreter, we were able to help them file their returns. Many of them, in turn, plan to use that money to support their families in Afghanistan,” Alt said. “For one family last year, we secured a refund of more than $10,000, which would have likely been left on the table had they not had our assistance.”

Alt earned her undergraduate degree from Gies Business and joined the Department of Accountancy in 2018 after 20 years in public accounting at Martin Hood.

To learn more about VITA, visit our website.