The numbers add up for Fillion

DRIVING FORCE: Ann Marie Fillion, CPA and principal at BlumShapiro, started out as a staff accountant at Sullivan & Co. in Providence in 1982. She's thrived in the industry in part because of a desire to help smaller businesses and nonprofits alike. / PBN FILE PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
DRIVING FORCE: Ann Marie Fillion, CPA and principal at BlumShapiro, started out as a staff accountant at Sullivan & Co. in Providence in 1982. She's thrived in the industry in part because of a desire to help smaller businesses and nonprofits alike. / PBN FILE PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

Ann Marie Fillion always had an affinity for both numbers and people – those two interests have translated into a career that transcends the typical accountant’s role in business.

Born in East Providence, Fillion, 55, started out as a staff accountant at Sullivan & Co. in Providence in 1982, shortly after earning her bachelor’s degree in accounting from Providence College in 1981. By 1988, she was promoted to a supervisory role and in 2013 remained a principal as the firm merged with BlumShapiro.

The love of math “runs in the family,” which includes three brothers who are either engineers or work in financial services, Fillion said.

But what makes North Kingstown’s Fillion tick is her inclination to help smaller businesses and nonprofits alike sort through the maze of regulatory requirements and mathematical analysis to keep business running smoothly and growing.

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“I’m pretty good at being proactive and being able to identify problems before they hit,” said Fillion, when asked to enumerate her strengths. “Thirty years of doing this and you start to notice things.”

Specializing in long-term health care and firms that help the developmentally disabled, she is deadline driven, highly organized, but flexible, and communicates clearly and responsively, she said.

A managing partner at Sullivan & Co. identified that health could be an area of growth early in Fillion’s career, around 1982, she said.

Today, her time is split equally between handling long-term-care facilities’ accounts with other staffers and handling firms that help the developmentally disabled, for which she is the only employee at BlumShapiro doing such work.

“I got in on the ground floor with learning the industry,” Fillion said. “It’s specific to every state how they run their Medicaid program; we’ve become experts in that.”

She relishes the challenge of her work, which extends to how she starts her workday, responding to emails and phone calls for urgent matters that frequently arise.

“I come in in the morning with a plan of what I’m going to do and then – a client needs help and usually they need it pretty quick,” she said. “So, you drop everything and you’re going to help them with that first.”

Fillion persists with her work despite suffering from a mild form and late onset of Stargardt’s disease, a progressive macular degeneration of the eyes that could lead to legal blindness. She compensates by using large computer screens and magnifiers. Luckily, the disease didn’t show up until her mid-30s and has progressed “very slowly.

“I plan to be here a while longer,” added Fillion. … “I don’t feel ready to retire. And I like the people I work with. I don’t think everyone can say that.”n

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