UNLV students win national accounting competition

By Ian Whitaker

Monday, Jan. 12, 2015 | 8:15 p.m.

Participating in a national accounting competition is not easy, but a team of UNLV accounting students decided to take it on last year.

Here’s the catch: It was the first time any UNLV students had ever participated in the competition.

Another catch: None of the students knew each other.

Here’s one more: They decided to throw out the rulebook and focus on more than just the numbers.

Here’s what happened: They won.

It’s been a few weeks since Annegennelle Figueroa, Brett Sebastian, Kevin Curry and Kayla Shim came out victorious in the 2014 American Institute of Certified Public Accountants competition in Washington, D.C., but the four students finally received their hero's welcome on Monday back at UNLV. They spoke about their experiences competing on a national level and were honored by faculty of the Lee Business School.

Figueroa, 21, didn’t even know about the competition earlier this year when she saw a mention of it in a newsletter from Beta Alpha Psi, an honorary accounting organization.

“As a kid I’ve always been in competitions,” she said. “I knew I wanted a UNLV team represented.”

So she went to Danny Siciliano, 46, one of her former UNLV accounting professors who retired from gaming industry giant IGT three years ago. Together they pulled in the three other students who had gone through Siciliano’s class recently.

They called themselves the Accounting REBEL-ation, and they were all balancing full-time course loads, jobs and personal lives.

“All four of us didn’t really know each other,” said Figueroa, who led the group as team leader. “So from the beginning we were kind of butting heads.”

They met in libraries late at night to pore over their assignment: Figure out a way to help Humble Pies Inc., a fictional company, make hard financial decisions to grow their pie-making business. Gradually they recognized each other’s strengths, and put them to use.

“Almost every Monday night we would meet up and brainstorm our ideas,” Figueroa said. “It was fun, we messed around a bit in the hallways when no one was around.”

“But while messing around we came up with good ideas that were really creative,” she said.

Their approach, instead of focusing just on the numbers, was to project a strategy based upon the core strengths of the business.

“Most people, when they think about the competition, they think about the financials and the profit,” Figueroa said. “But when you’re presenting to business owners, they don’t really understand some of the methods we use in accounting.”

For example, one assignment during the competition revolved around determining whether it was better for the company to buy a bakery or a chain of steakhouses. Not exactly exciting stuff, but it gave the team an opportunity to show off their out-of-the-box thinking.

The fictional owners of the company were two passionate pastry fans who spent their free time coming up with exciting new recipes. The UNLV students determined that the bakery was the better choice, because it could also incorporate a research facility to develop new pie recipes, one of the business’s strengths.

UNLV was one of 15 teams out of 140 to make it into the second round. In November, they found out they were advancing again to Washington, where they would compete in the finals with two other teams.

Before a 20-member panel of judges in a boardroom at the Willard InterContinental hotel, the four students sat through presentations from North Carolina State University and the University of Southern Indiana before they took the podium.

"I had them practice the presentation about 20 or 30 times,” Siciliano said. “They got really good at the presentation."

The judges then grilled them for 10 minutes before breaking for lunch. When they returned, they announced the winner.

”We were very ecstatic,” Figueroa said. “After all the weekends and late nights, we got first place.”

First place came with a $15,000 prize, $5,000 of which went to the UNLV accounting program to go toward future competitions, and the students pocketed the rest.

"When I went to UNLV, we won the national basketball championship in 1990,” Siciliano said. “So we like winners in Las Vegas."