Speakers

Taryn Carothers, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Taryn Carothers, CPA, CMA has over 30 years of accounting and financial experience in a variety of roles in a variety of industries. Taryn started her career as an auditor at Deloitte serving the non-profit, government, and manufacturing industries. As an auditor, she developed a deep understanding of financial testing, internal controls, and financial statement presentation. Taryn expanded her accounting and technical experience by leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations in the healthcare industries and within K-12 institutions. This experience gave her an appreciation of the daily tasks, workflow, and reporting used within the accounting and finance areas as well as across the organization.

Taryn then had an opportunity of a lifetime to become an accounting faculty member for a regional comprehensive public university. During her time as a faculty member, she taught Financial Accounting, Managerial Accounting, Intermediate Accounting, Accounting Information Systems, and Auditing along with several business administration classes. She focused on bringing current experiences and activities into the classroom, so students would be better prepared to join the accounting profession upon graduation. She also supervised the university’s school of business internship program. She visited students and their employers to connect how classroom experiences should adapt to improve student outcomes and ability to shine in the workplace. As a testament to bringing experiences to her students, Taryn hired two of her former accounting information system students as interns to assist with a cloud-based ERP implementation. One of these students remains employed at the K-12 school-district served because of the quality of the experience.

Taryn eventually took her classroom knowledge to serve in several administrative roles at two regional comprehensive public universities including controller, budget director, director of the project management office, and twice serving as the interim chief business officer. In these roles, she made a point to connect with classes, professors, and students as a reminder of those who were being served by these central services.

Taryn returned to Deloitte two years ago with the goal to apply her strong higher education experience to projects and institutions seeking ways to improve finance and administrative functions as they serve the greater mission of the universities. As hobbies, Taryn enjoys the outdoors and fishing, hikes with her spouse of 32 years, as well as being a novice singer/songwriter of country music.

Katharine N. Colling, KMPG

Katie Colling is a Manager at KPMG LLP's Ignition Tax practice based in Atlanta, GA, specializing in generative AI technologies, data transformation/visualization, and meeting design/presentation. She is a graduate of the University of Georgia where she studied Management Information Systems. Her notable achievements include building an analytic app that saves over 1400 hours annually as well as training and enabling over 1,000 professionals in generative AI technology since March 2023. Katie is passionate about the people in her network demonstrated through her heavy involvement in student mentorship at universities, through standing up a Women of Ignition Atlanta mentorship circle, and through assisting in the launch of a national parenting and caregiving network for Ignition Tax professionals.

David Wood, Brigham Young University

David is passionate about understanding new technologies and implementing them into the curriculum of Brigham Young University, where he works as the Glenn D. Ardis professor of accounting. David received his Ph.D. at Indiana University and his BS and MAcc degrees at Brigham Young University. At BYU, David teaches accounting data analytics and accounting information systems. David has published over 150 articles in a combination of respected academic and practitioner journals, monographs, books, and cases. His research has won multiple best paper awards. David is a current or past editor at five journals and editorial board member for nine journals. He works with the EY ARC to develop curriculum that is provided for free to academics throughout the world (see https://eyarc.site/). He is also a coauthor on the market-leading AIS textbook, Accounting Information Systems by Romney, Steinbart, Summers, and Wood and codeveloper of the https://www.byuaccounting.net/ and https://www.techhub.training websites.