Bizora Brews
What Does It Take to Lead Strategy at a Big Four Firm? - John Modzelewski
What happens when a chemical engineer ends up arguing tax law in front of judges, then spends a career deciding what KPMG's tax data should look like next? John Modzelewski is Chief Data Officer, Tax at KPMG, where he leads the firm's Ignition practice. His path there was not a straight line. He studied chemical engineering at MIT, worked as a research analyst crafting economic testimony at the Brattle Group, then went to Georgetown Law, where a class with Professor Martin Ginsburg redirected him into tax. From there it was Fried Frank, then EY's M&A tax practice, then KPMG, where he built the firm's first models for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and later took on the CDO role for the entire tax function. Together they explore why the foreign tax credit engine John coded alone on weekends still runs inside KPMG's models today, why clients so often protect their own tax processes even when a better tool is sitting in front of them, and how KPMG rebuilt its approach to firm wide AI rollout after learning hard lessons from an earlier push with GPT. John started building KPMG's first corporate tax reform model in December 2016, days after the election, working from two competing draft models that neither team could finish alone. When the full bill passed a year later, he was the one who volunteered to program the foreign tax credit module nobody else wanted to touch, a piece of code still doing real work at the firm years later. Tune in for a conversation about what it actually takes to move a large tax practice from spreadsheets to a centralized, AI powered data function.
