Bizora Brews

What makes someone pull over at a phone booth in the middle of a workday, call his wife, and tell her he is quitting to become a CPA?

Randy Crabtree is the founder of Tri Merit, the specialty tax firm he built around R&D tax credits starting in 2007, and the creator of Bridging the Gap, the wellness focused accounting conference now heading into its fifth year. He retired from Tri Merit two days after this conversation was recorded. Before any of that he studied computer science at Northern Illinois University, spent a year as a junior programmer at a large insurance company, spent another year selling soup to Chicago food jobbers, ran a generalist CPA firm from 1991 until he sold it in 2006, and built a real estate development company from zero to $220 million in projects before exiting in May 2006, months ahead of the crash.

Together they explore the stroke Randy had twelve years ago and the four year mental recovery that followed, what three years of his Accountant Satisfaction Survey reveal about why people actually stay in this profession, and how firms should decide which technology to adopt now that AI has every accountant feeling like they are working two jobs at once.

Randy walks through the first day Tri Merit was in business, when he left a client meeting holding a $20,000 deposit check against a projected $200,000 credit claim. He explains why he capped Bridging the Gap at roughly 400 attendees and handed the logistics to the Illinois CPA Society and Franklin Alliance for 2027. He also makes the case that Kodak and Fujifilm sold the same product and only one of them knew what business it was in. Tune in for a conversation about burnout, firm structure, and what accountants get wrong when change arrives.

What happens when a client tells their wealth advisor they got married, and the tax team only finds out after the return is filed?

Naomi Owotumi is General Manager of Accounting at Jump, where she is building the accounting vertical inside a company that already dominates wealth management with more than 40,000 users across 14,000 firms.

Before Jump she spent ten years at KPMG, first in financial services tax on regulated investment companies and partnerships, then in asset management tax technology, where she started and led a 40 person global data automation team spread across the US, Mexico City and India that delivered more than 500 solutions.

Together they explore why big four accounting is a bubble that feels enormous from the inside until you step out of it, what actually happens when wealth firms acquire accounting firms and run tax as a loss leader, and where automation belongs across the rest of the client lifecycle once compliance is no longer the only thing worth automating.

Naomi also gets into the year long busy season that comes from running RIC distribution season alongside extensions and filing deadlines, the Alteryx and ETL work that quietly replaced weeks of manual trial balance prep at a hundred entities at a time, and the advice she gives college students who are nervous that AI will automate the job before they ever get to do it. Tune in for a conversation about the convergence of wealth and accounting, and what a firm loses when the two sides do not share the same brain.

What happens to a profession when the jobs where people actually learned it start to disappear?

Kait Zech is a Partner at PKF O'Connor Davies and the incoming president of the New Jersey Society of CPAs. She started in accounting before college, doing back office work for a sole proprietor in her hometown and eventually learning bookkeeping, individual tax and business tax there. From that came a local firm near Seton Hall, an Ernst & Young member firm in New York City auditing large private foundations, and 15 years at PKF O'Connor Davies, where she now works across the professional services group and the outsourced accounting practice. The arc runs from the smallest firm in town to one of the largest firms in the country without ever skipping the fundamentals.

Together they explore why architecture, engineering and law firm clients need project level and personnel level data rather than a balance sheet and a P&L, how a second generation family business spent 18 months weighing an ESOP against developing the third generation against a sale to a third party, and why Kait believes the accounting pipeline problem belongs to firms rather than to college students.

She also talks about starting college as an art major before running the numbers on that career, and about the registered municipal accountant license New Jersey requires before anyone can sign off on a government audit. The family business story ends somewhere she did not expect: they sold to a third party, opened a private foundation with the proceeds, and that is what finally pulled the third generation in. Tune in for a conversation about succession planning, the 150 credit rollback, and what firms owe the people they hire at the bottom.

What if the two years at a Big Four firm that everyone treats as mandatory are no longer worth what they used to be?

Jerome Meyer is Vice President of Global Tax at AMD, where he leads a team of roughly 60 people covering every jurisdiction the company operates in. He got there without a plan. He grew up in Switzerland and southern Spain, came to Texas at 17 to play college tennis, went to law school in San Diego, and took an entry level job at KPMG because the financial crisis had closed the door on big law. He had no accounting background at all. The path from there ran through PwC, Deloitte's Global Strategies Group, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and National Instruments before the AMD CFO called in early 2023.

Together they explore what actually happens when a company at the center of the AI boom hands its tax department an AI mandate and most of the budget still goes to engineering, why Jerome believes a new graduate who is AI forward can now be worth more than a hire with two years of Big Four experience, and how he runs a 60 person global function by pushing decisions down while keeping ownership of any failure with himself.

He talks about watching compliance work shift to the Hyderabad centers of excellence early in his career, and about the dotted line to supply chain tax at HPE that taught him more about the business than any planning role would have. Tune in for a conversation about running global tax inside a semiconductor company during the AI build out.

What happens when you spend twenty years building a tax career in a country that did not have a corporate income tax?

Humayun Naseer is VP of Tax at Gulf Islamic Investments in Dubai, a Shariah compliant alternative investment firm with more than $4.5 billion under management. He started in 2005 at McDermott International doing intercompany accounting, work nobody else in the building wanted, and moved through Transocean, Oceaneering, Al Futtaim Group and Dubai Islamic Bank before landing on the investment side. He has never worked at a Big Four firm. Every step came from taking the task in front of him and figuring it out afterward.

Together they explore what the UAE corporate income tax regime looks like in practice and why book to tax adjustments are consuming the region right now, how tax authorities are already using AI to rebuild audit trails from transaction level data, and why the legacy systems most finance teams run on have no governance layer at all.

Humayun also talks about the day he initiated five years of unsettled intercompany transactions, learned what withholding tax was from the people calling him from Houston that night, and decided that jumping into the fire was the only way to learn anything. He closes on the platform he is building, and why he wants twenty years of knowledge to outlast his own career. Tune in for a conversation about building a tax career in a market that is writing its tax law in real time.

What happens to professional judgment when the machine gets good enough to exercise it?

Adam sits down with Tomás González, a 35 year veteran of tax across Latin America. He started at Arthur Andersen in Buenos Aires in 1988, made partner, moved to EY Argentina after the Andersen collapse, then crossed to the corporate side as Latin America tax lead at Shell and spent 16 years at Unilever running tax for the region. It is a career built almost entirely on walking into rooms where the function did not exist yet and building it.

Together they explore why the same region produces three completely different tax problems, with Mexico holding its law steady and collecting through aggressive audits while Argentina rewrites the rules constantly and Brazil runs on permanent litigation. They get into what actually decides a sell side deal in Latin America, where cases are lost on missing evidence rather than on the merits of a position. And they get into where BEPS and Pillar Two stall out until the US, China and Europe sit at the same table, and why Tomas thinks the honest endgame is a formulary approach nobody wants to say out loud yet.

Tomas walks through selling more than $1 billion of Shell downstream operations across the region, building the Unilever Latin America tax team from zero to 42 people, and the Argentine government's proposal for a new class of corporation operated by artificial intelligence with limited liability, which he reads as the same legal fiction we invented 300 years ago being invented again. Tune in for a conversation about what stays human in tax once the research, the analysis and eventually the judgment stop being ours.

What does it take to convince a public company CFO to rip out an ERP they have trusted for twenty years and replace it with something built four years ago?

Stephen Hedlund is Head of Finance at Rillet, the AI native ERP that just closed a Series C led by ICONIQ at a 1 billion dollar valuation. Before Rillet he worked at Walmart on SAP, then joined a Silicon Valley startup where migrating off QuickBooks onto NetSuite took eighteen months instead of twelve. He joined Rillet when the company had twelve employees, taking a pay cut with a second baby on the way, betting that the same broken finance tooling he saw at the largest retailer in the world was about to get rebuilt from scratch.

Together they explore how a dinner conversation with Dean at Armanino turned into the partnership model Rillet now runs with EY and KPMG, what it actually takes to reach a zero day close when prepaid schedules and journal entries are read and booked from a PDF with no human touch, and why Stephen thinks the ERP itself, not a chat wrapper sitting on top of it, will end up being the cheapest and fastest way to run finance AI agents.

Along the way Stephen talks about Boba, the internal agent that lets anyone at Rillet request a product change and see it shipped to production the same day. Tune in for a conversation about rebuilding the ERP, the end of the monthly close, and what the office of the CFO looks like when AI adoption becomes the job.

What happens when the CPA, the attorney, and the insurance advisor are all the same person sitting across the table?

Christopher C. Papin is a CPA, a licensed attorney in New York, Colorado, Texas, and Oklahoma, an insurance advisor, a Thomson Reuters thought leader, and the author of 168 Hours. He started in the corporate tax department of a Fortune 500 oil and gas company in Oklahoma City, moved into private law practice when the headquarters relocated to Houston, and then built his own firm of roughly eight people serving small businesses and their owners. The through line is not the credentials. It is that small business owners get insurance advice from one person, legal advice from another, financial advice from a third, and nobody ever puts it together.

Together they explore whether Arizona opening limited law practice to CPA firms is a preview of where the rest of the country goes, why the shift from 150 hours to 120 hours misses the actual reason people are leaving accounting for software equity, and why vetted, specialized research beats a general purpose model trained on everything on the internet when the answer has to survive an audit.

Chris talks about the client who asked why he wasn't quoting the insurance himself, which is how the insurance practice got started and why he is now working through securities licensing for the same reason. He walks through the COVID window where a law passed, the research bureau hadn't published it yet, and 16 emails were already sitting in his inbox asking what to do about it. And he explains how he discovered his book was already written, sitting inside years of slide decks and meeting transcripts, waiting to be pulled out and cleansed of client data. Tune in for a conversation about building a multidisciplinary practice, selling advice that clients don't yet know how to ask for, and why the most valuable thing you offer is judgment, not data entry.

What happens when a chemical engineer ends up arguing tax law in front of judges, then spends a career deciding what KPMG's tax data should look like next?

John Modzelewski is Chief Data Officer, Tax at KPMG, where he leads the firm's Ignition practice. His path there was not a straight line. He studied chemical engineering at MIT, worked as a research analyst crafting economic testimony at the Brattle Group, then went to Georgetown Law, where a class with Professor Martin Ginsburg redirected him into tax. From there it was Fried Frank, then EY's M&A tax practice, then KPMG, where he built the firm's first models for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and later took on the CDO role for the entire tax function.

Together they explore why the foreign tax credit engine John coded alone on weekends still runs inside KPMG's models today, why clients so often protect their own tax processes even when a better tool is sitting in front of them, and how KPMG rebuilt its approach to firm wide AI rollout after learning hard lessons from an earlier push with GPT.

John started building KPMG's first corporate tax reform model in December 2016, days after the election, working from two competing draft models that neither team could finish alone. When the full bill passed a year later, he was the one who volunteered to program the foreign tax credit module nobody else wanted to touch, a piece of code still doing real work at the firm years later. Tune in for a conversation about what it actually takes to move a large tax practice from spreadsheets to a centralized, AI powered data function.

What happens when a tax professional on the partnership track walks away to spend his days teaching AI models the work he spent a decade mastering?

Brendan Ryan is an AI tutor working with xAI's human data group, where he helps train frontier models on finance and accounting knowledge. Before that he spent over a decade at RSM building a career in financial services tax, working with hedge funds and private equity clients out of New York City, after starting his career as an auditor at a small South Carolina firm and pivoting into tax once he found himself doing forecast research instead of just review comments.

Together they explore why he thinks compliance work is already gone and much of consulting work is next, and what actually pulled him away from a firm and a leadership team he still speaks about with real respect.

Brendan sold his mattress, his old TI 83 calculator, and everything else he owned, then drove from Greenville, South Carolina to New York City in a 2002 Chevy Blazer to pursue a master's in tax, living for months on canned chicken and rice cakes in a spare bedroom in Bayonne, New Jersey. Tune in for a conversation about what tax professionals are actually worth once the compliance work disappears.