Shannon Chen is a tax expert who joined Gies Business this fall as an assistant professor of accountancy. Her work is a unique blend of rigorous corporate taxation and tax policy research and a genuine commitment to student development.
Before she went by Dr. Chen, she was a senior consultant in Deloitte’s international tax practice, doing work that she found engaging with sharp colleagues and complex challenges. But her mind went to bigger questions beyond whether her job was interesting: she wondered if it was adding up to something lasting. That question led her to a PhD program at the McCombs School of Business and onward to Gies Business – with a renewed focus on purpose.
“I was looking at my career from a long-term perspective,” said Chen. “I enjoyed the work I was doing – it was intellectually stimulating work with fantastic partners and senior managers who worked with multinational clients. But I felt that, long term, I needed a sense of overarching fulfillment, a purpose to what I was doing. I had professors in my undergraduate and graduate experience who really opened my eyes to what was possible.”
Opening Doors Through Accountancy
Those professors along her journey, whether at the University of Georgia or at the University of Texas at Austin, made the abstract concepts of tax and policy come to life. Now, she wants to do that for her students. Her years at Deloitte working on international tax issues for multinational clients became the building blocks of how she thinks about tax policy, corporate decision-making, and teaching today.
Chen’s instinct for making the abstract approachable is something unique she brings to Gies Business. Her goal across courses is to leave students capable, not intimidated, by complex ideas.
“I want to empower students, to make them feel like they can develop mastery and confidence,” said Chen. “So I try to demystify [tax] and make it more approachable. My goal is for students to walk away from my class with practical skills, no matter where they go in their career…what sounds really complicated and hard might actually not be.”
Chen’s teaching comes with bona fides: she’s an award-winning instructor who was named the Most Valuable Faculty by the Accountancy Undergraduate Program at the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management. But for Chen, the study of accountancy matters more for students than as a series of classes. It’s a career path uniquely situated to open doors.
“Ultimately, education is so important,” said Chen. “Accounting is a great career. I believe it offers a level playing field: You study hard, you earn your degree, you get your CPA license, and there is a career waiting for you. I especially love seeing first-generation college students succeed, because accounting can open doors they may not have thought were available. Accounting is an excellent pathway for future success.”
That’s a disposition toward teaching that fits naturally at Gies Business. In Chen’s telling, a purpose-driven accounting education is part of a toolset that prepares students for life far beyond the walls of Illinois.
Understanding Corporate Behavior and Tax Policy
Chen’s research and scholarship follow a similar line of thought – considering taxation as something with real impact, real stakes, and real decisions involved.
“Within accounting research, I’m squarely in the tax space,” said Chen. “Most of my work focuses on corporate behavior, be it the determinants of corporate behavior, or how firms respond to a policy change. It’s important to ask, ‘we have this policy, is it achieving what we want it to achieve?’”
That willingness to question a policy’s aims and results in light of the facts drives a line of research that spans how firms structure themselves for tax purposes, how multinational firms respond to policy changes like the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and how the media spotlight could influence corporate tax behavior. Her research on innovation box regimes, published in The Accounting Review, examines the impact of tax incentives on capital investment and employment. Her newer work includes a study examining how public libraries help low-income taxpayers claim the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).
It’s a fitting focus for a scholar whose line of thinking often returns to access and behavior – how we navigate the tax system, how firms make decisions in that system, and how policy shapes the entire thing. It’s a bridge between teaching and research that’s helpful for asking big questions, like whether the policies we write actually do what we intend them to do. Those questions get a lot easier to ask when we’re prepared for them by teachers who translate complexity into accessibility.
Asked about what people most often get wrong about their taxes, Chen doesn’t hesitate.
“The IRS does not write the tax code,” said Chen. “Congress passes legislation, which become part of the Internal Revenue Code. The IRS is tasked with administering and enforcing the tax code and providing guidance. They take the tax law and translate it in a way that helps taxpayers understand how to apply the law, such as through concrete examples with actual numbers. While they step in to provide guidance, they’re not the ones writing and passing the law. So give the IRS a break sometimes.”
That correction signals an orientation toward seeing systems as comprised of choices: choices made by people that can be explained, studied, and improved. That’s what purpose looks like in Chen’s line of work. It’s a disposition, a habit of asking whether the systems we build are doing what we mean them to be doing – and where we could be doing better.