Dawn is a Licensed Public Accountant (LPA) under Ontario’s Public Accounting legislation and is the accounting/assurance partner in the Firm. Dawn has more than 30 years of public practice and audit related experience. Dawn began her public practice career in 1984 with a Chartered Accounting firm that later merged with BDO Dunwoody and also spent time working in banking as a chief financial officer and general manager in credit unions for almost ten years. She has a Bachelor of Accounting Science degree, Fellows’ and Associate (Specialty in lending) designations from the Credit Union Institute of Canada, as well as her FCPA and FCGA designation(s). Dawn is a former member of the Public Accounting Licensing Board (PALB) for the Certified General Accountants Association of Ontario, and recently concluded a three-year appointment with the Public Accountants Council of Ontario (PACO).

Dawn formerly served as the Director of Public Practice for the Research and Standards department at the Certified General Accountants Association of Canada (CGAC) during her fourteen-year tenure with the national body. During this time she served as the Chair of the Ethics Task Force and Professional and Practice Standards Task Force to the National Professional Standards Committee. Today she serves on Porter Hetu’s national standards committee. As the senior standards person at CGAC she was responsible for the continuous development and maintenance of the CGAC Public Practice Manual which included the volume on auditing that was transformed from procedural based auditing to risk based auditing in conformance with international standards. She was also responsible for the Orientation to Public Practice series which is the program that all new practitioners across Canada must complete prior to entry into public practice. Continuing this tradition, today she is involved in authorship and publication of professional standards materials for CPA Canada’s Guide to Other Practice Areas manual.

Dawn recently concluded her second three-year term as a voting representative for CPA Canada to the International Federation of Accountants – Small and Medium Enterprise committee (IFAC-SMP) (having previously served as technical advisor to the Chair of the committee for a six-year term followed by a one-year term as a technical advisor for the Turkish Institute to this same committee). At IFAC Dawn was involved in the development of implementation guidance for small and medium-sized practices and participates in responses to exposure drafts for new (or revised) international accounting and assurance standards that apply specifically to small and medium sized enterprises around the world and that form the basis for most of the profession’s new standards that are being converged into Canada’s system, as well as chairing the Implementation Guidance Task Force. During her tenure with IFAC she co-authored the Guide to Quality Control for SMPS and authored the Guide to Compilation Engagements. In addition to these activities she is also currently serving as the SMP Committee representative to both the International Ethics Standards Board (IESBA) and International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB) Consultative Advisory Board; and is a correspondent member of the IAASB Quality Control Task Force that is working to revise the international quality control standards (ISQC 1 and ISA 220).