Meet Our Instructors

Craig Bain, CPA, Ph.D. (FAR Instructor)

Craig Bain is a Professor of Accounting at Northern Arizona University. He received his B.S in Accounting at California State University Chico and his Ph.D. at Texas A&M. He has published in some of the top academic and practitioner journals in Accounting. During his time in Arizona, he has had the opportunity to serve on the Board of Directors for several different companies and was named the Arizona Society of CPAs Accounting Professor of the year in Arizona. His teaching interests lie in the FAR accounting courses, where he has won awards from NAU and recognition from his students.

Dr. Bain is also an avid outdoorsman. He has fished in many places in the USA as well as other countries. He backpacks as often as possible and has done unsupported solo trips of 20+ days in the wilderness.

Gregory Carnes, Ph.D., CPA (REG Instructor)

Gregory Carnes is the Dean for the College of Business and the Raburn Eminent Scholar of Accounting at the University of North Alabama. He is also the former Dean of the College of Business at Lipscomb University. He is well known as an academic leader at the national level, having served as President of the Accounting Program Leadership Group, President-Elect of the Federation of Schools of Accountancy, and Secretary of the American Taxation Association. He currently serves as Chair of the Education Committee of the Alabama Society of CPAs and as President of the North Alabama ASCPA chapter.

Gregory Carnes: My name is Greg Carnes, and I’ll be leading you through the tax law, helping you prepare for Regulation, a section of the CPA exam. I’m currently the Dean of the College of Business at the University of North Alabama. In addition to that, I do all the tax material for CPAexcel. I’ve been associated with this program now for approximately 15 years.

I also do teaching for the American Institute of CPAs for tax seminars that professional tax preparers attend and I also do some writing for some textbooks out there. So, I’m really looking forward to working with you as you go through this tax material.

I think the tax law is very; it’s exciting. And one of the reasons that I think it’s interesting to folks regardless of their background, is because we all have to pay taxes. So, whether or not you’re planning on focusing on taxing your career or not, this material should have an interest to you.

Meghann Cefaratti, Ph.D. (FAR Instructor)

Meghann Cerfaratti is the Grant Thornton Professor of Accountancy in the Department of Accountancy at Northern Illinois University, where she teaches financial accounting and assurance services. She is also a member of the American Accounting Association, and her research has received awards from the Accounting and Information Systems Educators Association. Additionally, she is a former auditor for the Air Force Audit Agency (AFAA), where her audit coverage included Andrews Air Force Base, MD, the Pentagon, and various Air National Guard installations. Prior to working with the AFAA, she worked as a tax associate for PricewaterhouseCoopers in the Baltimore office.

Donald Deis, CPA, CFE, MBA, Ph.D. (FAR Instructor)

Don Deis is Texas A&M University System Regents Professor and the Joslin Endowed Chair of Accounting at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. He was an auditor for Touché Ross & Co. and an accounting professor at Louisiana State University and the University of Missouri. He teaches state and local government and not-for-profit topics in the FAR section of Wiley CPA Excel. He routinely teaches courses on Governmental and Not-for-Profit Accounting, Advanced Auditing, Forensic Accounting, and Professional Accounting Research. His research focuses on the quality of public sector audits, outsourcing of government services, and fraud. He is an avid fisherman, boater, and volunteer at PGA golf events.

Dan Gibbons, CPA, CMA (BEC Instructor)

Dan Gibbons is Accounting Professor at Waubonsee Community College. He teaches Financial accounting on a part-time basis at Northern Illinois University to undergraduate and graduate students as well.

Janet Gillespie, Ph.D.

Janet Gillespie was the Associate Chair, Department of Accounting at the University of Texas at Austin where she taught courses in accounting information systems, governmental accounting, and managerial accounting.

Elizabeth Grant, MAS, CPA (BEC Instructor)

Elizabeth Grant is an Instructor in the Department of Accountancy at Northern Illinois University. She got her BA from University of Virginia and her MAS from Northern Illinois University.

Liz: Hello. My name is Liz Grant. I’m currently a professor at Northern Illinois University, where I teach in the accountancy department. However, getting there was quite the journey for me. Originally, I started my studies at the University of Virginia as a Math major. After that, I moved to Pennsylvania and worked in the aerospace industry as a systems engineer. A few years later, I moved to Atlanta and worked in the marketing industry. Then, a few years after that, I finally moved to Chicago, where I stopped moving and worked in the financial markets for about eight years.

It was here where I met my husband. When I was pregnant with my fourth child, I decided to become a stay-at-home mom. Well, that lasted for about three months. And then I fell in love with tax and decided to go back to school to pursue my Masters in Accountancy at Northern Illinois University. After graduation, I passed the CPA exam and started working for a Big Four firm. Finally, after seven years, I came back to Northern Illinois because my true passion has always been teaching, and I’m very excited to teach you.

Kathleen Hill, CPA (BEC Instructor)

Kathleen Hill, BEC Mentor, holds an MBA in Accounting, a CPA, and has 20+ years in-industry experience, primarily as Controller within the Manufacturing, Construction, and Agricultural industries. She has also taught classes as an adjunct instructor in financial, managerial, and tax accounting within the OK State Higher Education System. During her career as Controller, she led her team in obtaining a $3MM award in payroll tax savings under the OK State Economic Incentive Program and was also instrumental in the design of an escheatment reporting program for her division, which was adopted by the organization as a whole, saving over $500,000 in fines. Kathleen is also the recipient of the Royal E. Knight Graduate Accounting in Excellence Award for her graduating class of 2011.

Kip Holderness, PhD, CPA, CMA, CFE (BEC Instructor)

Kip Holderness is an associate professor of accounting at West Virginia University. He teaches managerial and forensic accounting and works extensively with doctoral students conducting various research projects. Kip teaches internal controls, as well as the technology and analytics sections of the CMA exam. His research focuses primarily on the impact of fraud and employee deviance on organizations. He has received numerous research grants from the Institute for Fraud Prevention and the Institute of Management Accountants. In his spare time, Kip enjoys cabinetry and beekeeping.

Marianne M. Jennings, B.S. J.D. (REG Instructor)

Marianne M. Jennings is Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University. She teaches Ethics for Accountants, Business Law, Real Estate Law, Legal, Ethical, and Global Environment of Business. She has also authored hundreds of articles in academic, professional, and trade journals and was given best article awards by the institute of Internal Auditors and the Association of Government Accountants in 2001 and 2004. She has also written several books, including Case Studies in Business Ethics, Business: lts Legal, Ethical and Global Environment, and Real Estate Law.

Claire Latham, Ph.D (AUD Instructor)

Claire Latham is a Professor at Washington State University Vancouver, where she teaches intermediate accounting, accounting information systems and internal control, and auditing. She conducts empirical and behavioral research involving ethics and the public accountant with a concentration on efforts to enhance ethics training of students and professional accountants. Her research also focuses the use of behavioral scales in accounting research with a concentration on ethics research. She has published in numerous journals, including the Journal of Business Ethics, The International Journal of Auditing, The Journal of Forensic Accounting: Auditing, Fraud, and Taxation, Issues in Accounting Education, Advances in Behavioral Accounting Research, and the Journal of Accounting Literature.

Tamara Phelan, MBA, CPA, CMA (BEC Instructor)

Tamara Phelan is an Instructor in the Department of Accountancy at Northern Illinois University, and she received her MM from Northwestern University in Finance and Marketing.

Tamara Phelan: Hello, I am Tamara Phelan. I am a CPA and a CMA. Currently, I am an instructor of Managerial Accounting at Northern Illinois University. I also run the Academic Internship Program there.

I started in cost accounting at a steel mill in Chicago, worked there for many years, and then I moved on to the consulting practice at EY. I had a wonderful experience there, and my last several years were as a partner in that practice. I truly do love managerial accounting, and I think everyone should understand it.

I earned my CPA license a little later in life, so I can truly appreciate how difficult and challenging it can be to prepare for this exam. I am so pleased to share my knowledge and experience with you via CPAexcel, because this product gives you the tools to be successful in your journey. Best wishes.

Robert A. Prentice, J.D. (AUD, BEC, REG Instructor)

Robert A. Prentice is the Ed and Molly Smith Centennial Professor in Business Law and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the J.D. McCombs School of Business at University of Texas. He received his B.A. from the University of Kansas and his J.D. from Washburn University. His research and teaching interests include partnership and corporate law, securities regulation, and the legal liability of accountants.

Coming Soon

Pam Smith, MBA, PhD, CPA (FAR Instructor)

Pam Smith is the KPMG Endowed Professor of Accountancy and a Distinguished Teaching Professor at Northern Illinois University. Her teaching spans undergraduate, graduate, and professional training. Her areas of specialization for teaching and research are accounting and reporting related to business combinations, valuation, consolidation, derivatives and hedging, and ethics. She is an author and lecturer in the Financial Accounting and Reporting (FAR) section of the CPA exam for Wiley’s CPAexcel. She has received over a dozen teaching awards including recognitions at NIU, the Illinois CPA Society Outstanding Educator, and the AAA’s Innovation in Accounting Education award. She also has over 40 publications for both academic and practitioner audiences.

Outside of the classroom Pam is passionate about the integration of ethics into the curriculum. She and her husband are avid dancers, cutting the rug to everything from ballroom to polka, line dances to salsa, and swing to two-step.

Dan N. Stone, Ph.D., MPA, CPA (inactive) (BEC Instructor)

Dan N. Stone is the Rosenthal Endowed Chair in the Von Allmen School of Accountancy at University of Kentucky. He is an author of the corporate governance and information technology sections of Wiley CPAexcel. He teaches and conducts research on data visualization, text analytics, business analytics, and the effects of technology and mindfulness on attention and learning.

Dan: Hi. My name is Dan Stone, and I’m an accounting professor at the University of Kentucky. I earned my CPA designation in 1983 and something that students often ask me is how has the CPA exam changed from when I took the exam? And I have to say, I thought it was much harder back then because we were in a room with, like, 500 people and we had to carve our answers on the stone tablets. And so you’ve got the chisel and you got the mallet and you’re hitting the stone tablets and the chips were going everywhere. And there’s dust everywhere.

It is horrible. It was a mess. And I you know, I still have nightmares about it. If you wanted to go to the bathroom, there was no water. You had to mix the hydrogen with the oxygen. It was so hard, it was so hard. And today well, I’m joking, of course, right? So, none of those things were true. In reality, I think now the difference is when I took the exam, the entire content of the exam would probably fit on this table. And now the content of the exam was much, much, much greater. Balancing against that though you have many more resources is for learning about CPA exam content than you did before.

When I learned the CPA exam, I was using cassette tapes and books which were, frankly, somewhat out of date by the time I took the exam. So, I think the resource available to you to learn are much better in the content, the coverage is much greater. Some people call the BEC section the junk drawer of the CPA exam, and I think that’s in some ways an unfair characterization. In fact, I think BEC is the cornerstone or the foundation of the CPA exam, and much of the rest of the exam builds upon that.

And I am thrilled to teach the content that I teach with respect to the CPA exam, because it is very relevant in many cases to your lives apart from the CPA exam. So, it’s fun and exciting stuff to teach. When I went into the profession, I had a choice of being a CPA or basically becoming an IT statistics person and I chose to become a CPA I chose to work for an accounting firm, and I’ve chosen to stay in accounting. And getting the CPA certification was clearly the right choice for me. I have friends who went into IT. There was a boom. There was a bust. There was a boom. There was a bust.

They’re changing jobs frequently. There was very little job security. The choice to be a CPA, and to know a lot about technology worked really well for me. And I’m very happy that I made that choice and I think that you will be happy with that choice also. So one more thing I want to do before we get started. And that is I want to prepare you to slay the CPA exam monster with the sword of knowledge. So with the sort of knowledge, go forth and slay the CPA exam monster.

I started in cost accounting at a steel mill in Chicago, worked there for many years, and then I moved on to the consulting practice at EY. I had a wonderful experience there, and my last several years were as a partner in that practice. I truly do love managerial accounting, and I think everyone should understand it.

I earned my CPA license a little later in life, so I can truly appreciate how difficult and challenging it can be to prepare for this exam. I am so pleased to share my knowledge and experience with you via CPAexcel, because this product gives you the tools to be successful in your journey. Best wishes.

Donald E. Tidrick, Ph.D., MBA, CPA, CMA, CIA (AUD Instructor)

Don Tidrick is the Deloitte Professor of Accountancy at Northern Illinois University, where he has been on faculty since 2000. Prior to that, he was the Associate Chair and Director of the Professional Program in Accounting at the University of Texas at Austin. He began his academic career at the University of Notre Dame after earning his Ph.D. in accounting from The Ohio State University. He also earned his bachelor’s degree in accounting from Ohio State followed by an MBA degree from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Prior to entering the doctoral program at OSU, he was an auditing professional in the (Big Eight) firm now known as KPMG. He is an author and video lecturer for Wiley CPAexcel’s Auditing and Attestation course. A recipient of numerous awards, he was honored to have received the AICPA’s Distinguished Achievement in Accounting Education Award and the Illinois CPA Society’s Outstanding Accounting Educator Award.

Donald E. Tidrick: Hello, my name is Don Tidrick. I’m the Deloitte Professor of Accountancy at Northern Illinois University. Something that I hope might come across through these video lessons to you is that I have a passion for being a CPA. I think it’s an awesome profession. And one thing you’ll never hear me say is the accounting industry. It’s not an industry. It’s a profession. And when we put someone else’s interests ahead of our own personal interests, when we put the public interest first, when we put the profession’s interests ahead of our individual self-interest, we have the right to call ourselves a profession.

I’m very proud to have been a CPA now for several decades. And one of the things that I want very much is to help you realize your dream, your aspiration of becoming a CPA. Look, this is very doable. It’s still fundamentally an academic exam. And so as we go through these technical topics while at CPAexcel we’ll help you sort of distill this enormous volume of subject matter into bite-sized lessons that by putting forth a good faith effort, you too can pass the CPA exam and enjoy being a CPA.

Tammy R. Waymire, CPA, Ph.D. (AUD Instructor)

Tammy Waymire is a Professor of Accounting at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), and she is the MTSU Accounting Advisory Board Outstanding Professor. Prior to joining MTSU in 2017, she served on the faculty at Northern Illinois University (NIU) for nine years. She specializes in governmental and nonprofit accounting and auditing, currently serving as the sole academic member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) Not-for-Profit Advisory Committee (NAC) and having previously served as the President of the Government and Nonprofit (GNP) Section of the American Accounting Association. She is an award-winning teacher, having taught courses in governmental and nonprofit accounting at the undergraduate and graduate levels, financial reporting courses at the undergraduate and executive MBA levels, and doctoral seminars. She has been recognized with teaching and research awards, and she has published 24 peer-reviewed articles in journals including Journal of Governmental & Nonprofit Accounting, Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting & Financial Management, Issues in Accounting Education, Journal of Government Financial Management, CPA Journal, Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting, Nonprofit Management & Leadership, and Journal of Accounting Education, among others. Prior to her career in academia, Tammy held public service positions requiring expert witness testimony in public utility ratemaking proceedings and Medicaid fraud cases.

Jeanne Yamamura, CPA, MIM, Ph.D. (AUD Instructor)

Jeanne Yamamura is an international consultant and educator providing instruction and training to students in the United States and around the world. Her career has straddled both the professional and academic worlds, including positions in public accounting, the financial services industry, government, and universities. She began as an auditor with Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co., spent time in internal audit with American Express and the County of San Luis Obispo, and served in various capacities in the savings and loan industry. In academia, she specialized in teaching Auditing and Accounting Information Systems but has also taught International Accounting and the full array of accounting classes. In CPAexcel, you will find her in the AUD section providing answers to student posts, leading the AUD Virtual classes, and addressing common problem areas in the Deep Dives. Outside of work, travel and food are her primary interest—with international hiking trips currently topping the list.

Suzanne Youngberg, CPA, MST (REG Instructor)

Suzanne Youngberg is an accountancy instructor at Northern Illinois University teaching taxation at the undergraduate and graduate level. She has previously taught continuing professional education training for a large public accounting firm and in NIU’s CPA Review Program. She currently teaches the 11th hour product and in the Virtual Classroom for the REG portion of Wiley CPAexcel. She is also currently co-authoring a tax textbook for Wiley with Dr. Greg Carnes. Suzanne has maintained her own tax practice for 29 years in the Chicago suburbs. Her publications have focused on individual taxation. Suzanne is an avid sports fan following her favorite Chicago teams.