AccountingWEB's Guest Writers

Richard D. Alaniz is senior partner at Alaniz and Schraeder, a national labor and employment firm based in Houston. Alaniz has been at the forefront of labor and employment law for over 30 years. He was a trial attorney with the U.S. Department of Labor and served on the President's Cost of Living Council during the Nixon Administration. He also held prominent posts within the National Labor Relations Board, first in Washington D.C. and later in Minneapolis, where he coordinated the NLRB's enforcement actions in the five-state Midwestern region.

Chad Brubaker is the president and CEO of Emochila Inc., one of the nation's leading CPA Web site marketing and Web site design firms. He founded San Francisco-based Emochila in 2003 and built the proprietary platform that powers award-winning Web sites for thousands of accountants and CPAs.

Phyllis Weiss Haserot is the president of Practice Development Counsel, a business development and organizational effectiveness consulting and coaching firm she founded over 20 years ago, A special focus is on the profitability of improving inter-generational relations and transitioning planning for baby boomer senior partners. Phyllis is the author of "The Rainmaking Machine" and "The Marketer’s Handbook of Tips & Checklists" (both West 2009).

Bruce Katcher, Ph.D., is an industrial/organizational psychologist and president of Discovery Surveys, a firm that specializes in conducting employee opinion and customer satisfaction surveys. His award-winning book, 30 Reasons Employees Hate Their Managers (AMACOM, 2007), provides lessons learned from the more than 50,000 employees he has surveyed in 80 organizations. His clients include: Alcoa, Delta Dental Plan, Fidelity Investments, Johnson and Johnson, Manulife Financial, the Mayo Clinic, Revlon, Timberland, Tufts University, and W.R. Grace. He publishes Improving the Workplace, a free electronic newsletter that highlights the results of his employee surveys and provides management with advice on how to solve problems encountered in the work place.

Brett Owens is the CEO and cofounder of Chrometa, a software company dedicated to automatically capturing and making sense of your time for you, so that you can accurately and easily account for your billable and project time. The inspiration for Chrometa came from a good friend of Brett's, an attorney at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer and Feld LLP, who hated reconciling his time manually, and wanted a completely effortless piece of software that would do all of the heavy lifting for him by automatically recording how he spent time on his PC and other computing devices.

David H. Ringstrom, CPA is the President of Accounting Advisors, Inc., an Atlanta-based software and database consulting firm that he started in 1991. David helps clients nationwide use Excel more effectively by providing training or developing custom Excel and Access-based tools. David is fond of saying "Either you work Excel, or it works you", and he works hard to empower his clients and readers of his articles so that they can harness Excel's power effectively.

Dr. Curtis C. Verschoor, CPA, CIA, CMA, CFE, is Emeritus Ledger & Quill Research Professor in the School of Accountancy and MIS and honorary Senior Wicklander Research Fellow in the Institute for Business and Professional Ethics, both at DePaul University. He also is CEO of C.C. Verschoor & Associates, Inc., author, researcher, chair, and member of audit committees, consultant, speaker, and expert witness.

Troy Waugh, CPA, MBA, is author of two books and has been selected as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the accounting profession for seven years in a row by Accounting Today Magazine. He is one of the leading leadership and business development consultants to the accounting industry. Troy and his experienced consultants have helped firms add more than $600 million in new business through their consulting, training and alliance services.

Joe Woodard is an Advanced Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor and Intuit Solution Provider who has taught more than 20,000 QuickBooks consultants across the country. Joe works with Intuit, state CPA societies, and Atlanta-area CPA firms to present advanced QuickBooks instruction to accounting professionals and software consultants. Joe has earned a unique relationship with Intuit as a trainer, consultant, and author.

Gary D. Zeune, CPA, is founder of The Pros & The Cons, the only speakers' bureau in the United States for white-collar criminals. He has written several books and has authored more than 40 articles on fraud and performance measures in national publications. Using 35 years of experience in auditing, corporate finance, and investment banking, Zeune provides CPAs, attorneys and executives with hands-on experience in fraud, auditing and corporate strategy. Zeune teaches fraud classes for the FBI, the U.S. Attorney, more than 30 state and national CPA societies, and numerous banks and accounting firms.