Trisha Buchmann

EA

Trisha Buchmann began her career as a Classicist (i.e. dead languages). After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, her first foray beyond the ivory tower involved investigating a multi-year employee embezzlement scheme, teaching her far more about forensic accounting than she ever wanted to know. She escaped back to academia to study theology and canon law, taking up tax work only to pay her tuition bills at first, but quickly discovered that it was much easier to pay the rent working for Mammon than working for God. Fortunately, a decade of translating Ciceronian syntax, with its excessive use of subordinate clauses, followed by several years studying Aquinas, with his innumerable theological distinctions, meant reading the statutory texts upon which tax law is based was fairly easy by comparison. After all, the Internal Revenue Code and the Code of Federal Regulations are both divided into easily-referenced parts. Cicero was hardly so kind!
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> Long working in the shadow of CPAs, she was admitted to practice as an EA in 2012. After finally overcoming her EA inferiority complex, she settled into the world of international taxation, eventually becoming the compliance manager for a mid-sized firm focusing on the tax needs of Americans living abroad. A few lost years followed, until she was scooped up to become Senior Tax Advisor at John Sheeley, Inc.