I'm a senior manager with a Big 4 accounting firm, but don't do any of the traditional Big 4 shit (accounting, advisory/consulting, tax compliance, transactions/M&A). I'm in a 30-35 person quant shop, mainly economists, statisticians, and applied math folks. We have three focus areas of which I work in two: tax policy/regulatory, statistical sampling, and quantitative surveys/web data collection. Our structure:

We have six partner/executive directors at the top (4 policy, 1 sampling, and 1 survey). We have four senior managers (1 policy, 2 sampling, and me), a group of managers, then some seniors, then 12-15 staff. Managers are dedicated to a single line usually, seniors tend to, and staff have to work in all three service lines (though they often end up having a preference one way or another). We're attached to our National Tax department, which is the tax think tank for the firm (all the brilliant tax lawyer/cpas work there) and so my boss answers to the head of NTD, who answers to the Americas Vice chair of tax, Global vice chair of tax, and then the Firm's Chairman. (The firm's chairman is a big tax policy guy and so we do a lot of work directly for him. He also sees us as a competitive asset, so we get investment from the firm beyond our "client" revenue). External revenue for the group is about $15 million/year, with the additional investment noted above.

I do a lot of work on the survey side- mainly web data collection efforts. For example, I've built the tool we use for clients to collect the project information that client needs to qualify for the R&D tax credit- which we often do with the sampling folks (because getting that data for all the projects often costs a company more than the credit itself is worth). One fun one is we manage the all-star balloting and the season balloting for a major sports league.

I also do a lot of tax policy work- all over the place, but especially in the nonprofit and insurance spaces. Looking under my real name, you'll find a number of papers I've done on hospital Form 990 Schedule H filings- this is the form required by the IRS that quantifies all the charitable work and community benefits each hospital provides. I also do hospital benefit of tax exemption studies- essentially what taxes the hospital currently isn't paying that they would be if they suddenly became for profit; we then match this up against their community benefits to get a sort of ROI for the hospital. For example, we may estimate a hospital isn't paying $1m in taxes, but provides $5m in community benefits, a 500% ROI. I've done these studies at the individual hospital, system, state, and national levels.

I've done insurance premium tax studies to look at the income tax equivalents, as well as modelling the retaliatory tax system and changes to the premium tax. I can go into detail but this is a crazy system.

I've also done work in the cable industry (in Ohio). I had my work on PMI (private mortgage insurance) used to lobby Congress to ultimately get PMI to be tax-deductible. The younger folks won't care yet, but any first time homebuyers will understand and thank me.

My job often requires me to become a quick "expert" in an area so we can help with the study, whether we're working on a survey of utility storm damage for the past year, or the local requirements of cable companies to retain their "monopoly" to how oil and gas extraction is different from fracking in the tax code and regs. It requires me to be ready to quickly learn about something and be able to understand it enough to speak on it and, if necessary, present arguments. This should surprise nobody.

I manage the staff/seniors/managers under me- two managers I work with pretty closely, and a bevy of seniors and staff. We tend to hire the staff out of college, they stay for 2-3 years, then go back for an advanced degree. I answer directly to the survey lead Exec Director. I'm close buddies with the sampling partner, and work off and on with the other policy partners.

I love my job: it has a ton of flexibility, though a lot of responsibility for getting the job done is there. My office has my laptop centered between two monitors. Center lappy has email and Word when working on a report. Left screen is Firefox with FB and FE opened in tabs, as well as any surveys I'm testing in that browser. Right hand monitor is IE/Edge for testing, Excels/ppts I need to review.

Yeah, the three monitors is key for me- when I;m home with just the lappy monitor I find I get a lot slower, since I can't view things side by side without looping it together.