CPA and Former State Auditor: Accounting and CPA Exam Help

Chuck S.

I am a Certified Public Accountant licensed in Virginia, and I also hold the Certified Government Financial Manager and Certified Fraud Examiner designations. I earned my Bachelor of Science in Business Administration in Accounting and Finance from Old Dominion University in 2014 and passed the CPA exam shortly after.

I spent nine years with the Virginia Auditor of Public Accounts, the Commonwealth's external audit agency, starting as a staff auditor and becoming an audit supervisor. I audited state agencies and public colleges and universities. That work was financial statement and compliance auditing: planning engagements, assessing risk, designing and performing testing, reviewing the work of my staff, and preparing and reviewing financial statements and footnotes. Supervising meant a large part of my week was spent teaching. New staff arrive knowing the textbook and not much about how an actual engagement runs, so I walked them through why a procedure exists, what evidence it is meant to produce, and where their reasoning had gone wrong when it had.

I now work as a Financial Reporting Administrator in the controller's office at a public university in Virginia, where I am one of four CPAs in the department. I prepare the annual financial statements and footnotes, handle the university's lease and subscription accounting under the governmental standards, and prepare the state reporting submissions. I reconcile balance sheet accounts and build the workpapers our external auditors review every year.

My tutoring will be one on one, mostly with college students taking accounting coursework and with candidates studying for the CPA exam. I am also comfortable with high school students in an introductory accounting course. I work from the student's own material rather than a fixed curriculum, because the gap is almost always specific and the fastest way to find it is to have the student explain their reasoning out loud.