What has Ben done with his life?

Ben has spent most of his life being a dork and saying too many lame puns. Oh wait you mean work experience. He could potentially answer that.

2021-2023: MNP LLP, Senior Tax Manager - Domestic Specialty Tax
Previously used to work as a Senior Tax Manager at MNP LLP, specializing in taxation for sell-side Mergers and Acquisitions.
Notable responsibilities include:
- Planning and structuring corporate reorganizations to maximize shareholder value in large merger and acquisition transactions.
- Creating financial models to project impact to stakeholder in sale transactions, employee stock purchase plan implementation, and family estate freezes.
- Drafting direction letters and liasing with lawyer to execute and implement reorganizations

2020 - 2021: Ernst & Young LLP, Tax Senior - Private Client Services
Previously worked at Ernst & Young as a Tax Senior in the Private Client Services group
Notable responsibilities include:
- Managing the group's T1 Season, providing technical advice on tax treatment of personal tax sitautions, and implementing new technologies to improve efficiency and workflow.
- Canadian tax compliance and review for private corproations, providing advice to the private mid-market sector of businesses

2013 - Present: UWAFSA Tax Clinic - Project Manager (?)/ Advisor (?)/ Supervisor (?)
Supervises UWAFSA's annual Tax Clinic, guiding students and teaching them how to prepare personal tax returns for the low income residents and students of the KW region.
Accomplishments
- Developed procedures and guides to improve quality of tax returns prepared and implemented numerous quality control measures
- UWAFSA Tax clinic has grown significantly, going from 500 returns prepared annually in 2014 to over 1,200 in 2019.
- Assists in the annual interactive lecture provided to first-year students, introducing them to how to prepare excellent quality tax returns! (p.s, have you met Eric Fong ? You really, REALLY need to.)
- Hoping to utilize data collection,technology, and automation to better serve more members of the community. - Heck, even this website was really made to improve the Tax Clinic.

2019: CIBC, Internal Auditor
Previously used to work at CIBC as an Internal Auditor as part of their CPA rotation program.
Notable responsibilities included:
- ... Honestly I have no clue what I took away from this job. Internal Audit was not a happy time of my life
- I wasn't being challenged, and I felt like I spent most of my time using Excel to automate my work.
- MOVING ON.

2017 - 2019: CIBC, Tax Analyst
Previously used to work at CIBC as an Tax Analyst as part of their CPA rotation program.
Notable responsibilities included:
- Corporate tax compliance for many of CIBC's subsidiaries, notably for the Wealth Management group. This would include corporate tax returns and foreign reporting compliance. SO MUCH FOREIGN REPORTING.
- Corporate tax provisioning, estimating the tax liability that arises throughout the year for financial reporting purposes

2016: CIBC, Accounting Policy
Previously used to work at CIBC in Accounting Policy during my last co-op term.
Notable responsibilities included:
- Researching changes in accounting policy, at the time the major change was the transition from IAS 39 to IFRS 9 (Financial Instruments). Given that this was a bank, they would be heavily impacted, and this was an item of extreme interest.

2015: Sunlife, Financial Analyst - Management Accounting
Previously used to work at Sunlife in the Management Accounting group during my 3rd co-op term.
Notable responsibilities included:
- Budgeting and variance analysis of of Sunlife's information technology groups
- Essentially setting up fiscal plans for groups, and determining why there was a variance to performance, whether positive or negative

2015: Vincent G. Dong, CPA, CA - Staff Accountant
Previously used to work at Vincent G. Dong, CPA, CA's office as a Staff Accountant in my 2nd co-op term.
Notable responsibilities included:
- Preparation of financial statements, bookkeeping, tax compliance and planning
- Pretty much did everything in the accounting cycle from beginning to end for small to mid-sized clients
- Honestly one of my favourite jobs, learned a lot about accounting and started enjoying tax here

2014: Hay Group - Financial Analyst
Previously used to work at Hay Group (since acquired by Korn Ferry) as a Financial Analyst in my 1st co-op term.
Notable responsibilities included:
- Researching and compiling information regarding the executive pay of large corporations
- Analyzed above data to come to a conclusion regarding executive compensation and advise the Board of Directors on the pay system of their executive suite
- Long-story short, I got to tell CEOs they got paid way too much! =D
- Learned most of my excel skills here and built on them from here, a very very good starting point for me