A detailed biography...

My name is Laurie Yoon, C.P.A, C.A. and I am the owner of Expatax Services Ltd. My tax practice currently consists of myself year round and one part-time assistant from January to May each year. I first started working in the accounting field in high school doing bookkeeping for various companies on a self-employed contract basis which continued through university. I started working for a Chartered Accountant friend of the family in January 1996 upon graduation. I moved to Price Waterhouse in January 1998 and began preparing US personal taxes in 1999. I did not like working in the big firm atmosphere of the newly merged PriceWaterhouseCoopers so left them to join a small one-partner international tax boutique firm called CompassTax in the summer of 1999. I enjoyed working there and stayed until October 2004. My responsibilities gradually increased while there, from simply preparing various returns to supervising and training another tax preparer in the summer of 2000. After only a short while, I was put in charge of coordinating and reviewing all personal tax work and equalization calculations in the spring of 2001 for a major international engineering firm that sent employees all around the world. I typically had two co-op students each tax season that I was in charge of training.
 
I made the leap to starting my own practice in October 2004 and began slowly building my client base through friends and family. I did not have enough clients at first to support myself so I contracted out my review skills to Collins Barrow for two years in March and April and trained CompassTax’s co-op students. This provided additional experience in international matters as I reviewed Canadian returns for the Collins Barrow partners and trained their first year tax preparers. I also gained invaluable experience in preparing US returns for the US tax partner. By the third tax season in the spring of 2007 I had enough clients of my own to get me through without additional outside contracting. By this point I was starting to get new clients by referrals from clients I was already helping. My first child was born in December 2007 and my second in September 2009 so my practice did not grow significantly during that period as I was trying to look after two young children while still working to grow my practice. I hired my first co-op university student to help out part-time during the spring of 2009 and have had an assistant every year since then. I usually have a different assistant each year however my current assistant has indicated he will return again next tax season.
 
I am originally from Calgary but moved to West Kelowna, BC in the summer of 2011. I was afraid I would have to start building my practice almost from scratch again but to my pleasant surprise almost all of my clients retained my services the following year even though I could no longer meet with them face to face. Currently I deal with my clients almost exclusively by phone and email although I have picked up a number of local clients as well since then.
 
The original name of my practice was Laurie Mounteer Professional Corp. Mounteer is my maiden name and you will note my email is still [email protected]. I married in 2006 but continued using my maiden name as all of my clients and friends knew me that way. When we moved to West Kelowna I decided to start using my married name Yoon. I will answer to either name.
 
My practice has evolved over the years to be almost entirely personal tax, and I specialize in people with cross border personal tax issues. As a result I am very busy from January to late June. I have a handful of corporate returns that need to be done from the fall through January however they tend to be personal service type corporations for people that came to me originally for international issues on their personal tax returns. I am not actively seeking new corporate work and I enjoy having the summers and fall almost entirely off as my children are still young. I still respond to any emails and questions that my clients have and occasionally have new US citizens that show up in the off season needing to get caught up on their US tax returns.
 
For all of your tax needs, please call or email me today, and let’s talk taxes!