The chief accounting officers and heads of tax who sign the numbers the enterprise runs on — recognized for the scope of the seat, and for the rare choice to talk about the work in public.
Every public company runs on numbers somebody has to sign. The chief accounting officers and heads of tax who sign them are the quietest senior leaders in the enterprise — officers whose job selects, structurally, against saying anything in public at all. These nineteen are the exception: leaders carrying real scope who also choose to explain the craft. That combination is rarer than it should be, and that is precisely why this list exists.
How honorees are chosen
What earns a place
I
Scope of the seat
Leaders who own the function at real scale — the controllership, the tax organization, the filings the enterprise stands behind — not a slice of it.
II
A public voice
The rare accounting or tax chief who shows up to explain the work: the close, the policy, the talent pipeline, and where the function is heading next.
III
Modernizing the function
Operators rethinking how accounting and tax actually run in an AI-driven economy, while keeping the numbers something you can trust.
The Class of 2026
Nineteen leaders across two tracks. Hover or tap any leader to flip their card and read the citation. This roll call grows through the year as the class takes shape.
Track IThe Controllers11 leaders
Chief accounting officers and controllers — the officers who own the close, the filings and the numbers the enterprise stands behind.
01
Stephanie Lepori
Caesars Entertainment
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Stephanie Lepori
Chief Accounting, Human Resources & Administrative Officer
Her title tells the story: accounting, human resources and administration under one leader across fifty-plus properties. Stephanie Lepori has been with Caesars since the opening of Silver Legacy in 1995 and helped steer the company through the acquisitions that made it what it is — and she is among the most consistently present finance voices in hospitality.
Julie Bishop spent eleven years climbing Yahoo’s accounting organization, then steered global reporting through its multibillion-dollar separation from Verizon. At McAfee she is running a full finance transformation, ERP and all, while the company remakes itself around consumer software. She writes her own posts and puts her team in front of the recognition — rarer at this level than it should be.
Chief Accounting Officer & Head of Global Financial Controls
A member of Bank of America’s management committee, Johnbull Okpara oversees the global corporate controller, corporate tax, legal entity and regulatory reporting functions. Thirty years on from Arthur Andersen, by way of American Express, Capital One, Morgan Stanley and Citi, he leads on what he calls feed-forward: what am I going to do next time, rather than what did I do wrong last time.
Lindsey Oshita owns global accounting, SEC reporting, ESG disclosure and SOX compliance for a team of eighty-plus at Franklin Templeton, where she has spent her entire post-Deloitte career and climbed from accounting policy to the top seat. She is a fixture on the finance conference circuit and speaks there in her own voice.
Danielle Bastardi built the controllership at Harry’s, then ran the books at Madewell and J.Crew before taking the chief accounting officer seat at the most-watched sports league in America in 2024. A retail operator’s instincts, applied to football.
Six seats in eleven years at UPS: external reporting, investor relations, corporate accounting, a $54B domestic business, FP&A, and now global chief accounting officer. Sarrah Schoenewald once served as the company’s spokesperson to its investors and wrote the CEO’s annual letter — which may be why she is among the few accounting chiefs entirely at ease in public. She is now driving the largest Oracle implementation in UPS history.
Sixteen years at KPMG across India, the UK and Canada, then chief accounting officer seats at OpenText, Under Armour and now Dollar Tree. Aditya Maheshwari has built the function at three very different companies, and he hands the credit to his team every quarter.
Named 2025 National Controller of the Year, Renee Jewell is putting AI to work inside Airbnb’s global controlling organization and talking openly about what it actually changes.
Junko Swain has taken two companies public and now leads accounting, tax, internal audit, procurement and sustainability controllership at Workiva. She left Japan for a career she felt she could not have there, and this spring she joined the board of Tokyo-listed Metaplanet.
Lauren Hotz leads accounting at Intuit and is one of the clearer voices on what the chief accounting officer role is actually becoming as generative AI moves into the close.
AJ Harris audited the Lakers as a young associate at PwC. His first client became his employer, and last August he became their chief accounting officer — having already rebuilt a manual finance function into a modern one.
Chief tax officers and heads of tax — the leaders deciding how the enterprise meets the code, in the least publicly narrated function in finance.
01
Urvi Doshi Sood
Lockheed Martin
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Urvi Doshi Sood
VP, Taxes & General Tax Counsel; Acting Treasurer
Urvi Doshi Sood runs tax and, at present, treasury at Lockheed Martin, and chairs the board of the Tax Council Policy Institute. Two decades into her time there, she is still the rare tax chief who shows up week after week to explain the work in public.
Stephen Dunphy leads tax at one of American retail’s most disciplined operators and serves as international secretary of Tax Executives Institute — where a great deal of the profession’s real teaching quietly happens.
Joseph Bertucci sits where the AI buildout meets the tax code, leading global tax for one of the world’s largest data center platforms — and he is unusually willing to think out loud about what that means.
Shelley Chase has led tax at Patagonia for eleven years, through the company’s transformation into an environmental trust. She describes a leadership structure far flatter than its size would suggest, and hers is a rare tax seat where the philanthropy is the whole point.
Gus Makris came up through Cravath, Sidley and King & Spalding, spent seven years as tax counsel at Turner, then stepped into the chief tax officer seat at Dow in 2025. He calls himself a finance executive and a legal executive in the same breath — which is increasingly what the job actually is.
Sandhya Edupuganty leads tax at Sabre and has served as international president of Tax Executives Institute. She helped build the DFW tax school into a genuine training ground for the people coming next.
Kanthi Morrissey leads tax at IBM, one of the most complex tax footprints in technology, and is among the first chief tax officers to speak publicly about what AI actually does to the function.
Emily Whittenburg came up through Arthur Andersen, EY, Waste Management and Shell before taking the chief tax officer seat at Nike. She calls herself a player’s coach — twenty-six years a player herself — and she leads a global tax team like a team.
The Controllers & Tax Power List is a living series, reviewed on a rolling basis — it takes two minutes, and recognition often turns on someone deciding to put a name forward.
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