Bryant team competes in xTax

By William Hamilton
PBN Staff Writer
Twitter: @waham

(Corrected, 12:30 p.m.)

SMITHFIELD – A team of accounting students from Bryant University was one of five teams in Washington, D.C., last week to compete in the national finals of xTAX, a competition sponsored by accounting giant PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

The Bryant team – Courtney Bernard of Uxbridge, Mass.; Dan Cournoyer of Jefferson, Mass.; Ryan Hansen of Peabody, Mass.; Cornelia Li of Wuhan, China; and Anthony Nader of Milton, Mass. – went head to head against teams from Brigham Young University, University of California-Berkeley, University of Houston and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

The Bryant team is coached by Michael Lynch, a Bryant accounting professor.

Brigham Young won the competition.

xTAX – short for “extreme tax” – is part of the xTREME Games launched by PriceWaterhouseCoopers in 2002. The competition is designed to build critical thinking, teamwork and communication skills through real-world business challenges.

This year, more than 905 teams from 83 colleges and universities took part in preliminary rounds of xTAX and xACT, a similar competition focused on accounting.

By advancing to the finals, the Bryant team won $10,000 for the team and an additional $5,000 for the team’s adviser.

The names of Bryant team members Dan Cournoyer and Anthony Nader was spelled incorrectly in an earlier version of this story.