FIRM NEWS: KEEPING UP WITH LvHJ TEAM

Happy New Year!
We hosted our first in-person holiday party since 2019, and everyone had a wonderful time catching up and celebrating.
We enjoyed our latest lunch meet-up at barbacco eno trattoria in San Fran! These are the best days, when we can see everyone and have a great time outside of work.
We are loving these lunch outings at LvHJ. Catching up with coworkers over some delicious food is the just best!
We had SUCH a great time at our summer outing, at Plank, in Oakland, CA! We ate delicious food, went bowling, played pool, got to pet some doggies and enjoyed socializing outside of the office!
We had such a fabulous time during our lunch meeting at Jack’s Bar & Grill last week! Thanks to all who could come join us, we look forward to more fun outings this summer!
LvHJ employees are grateful for the busy tax season to have come to an end earlier this week, and to celebrate the office will be closed on Friday, April 22nd.
Thank you to all of our clients and staff for a successful tax season!
This month our team enjoyed a fun virtual event making bubble tea! Have you ever had and/or made boba before? We made the dough from scratch, had a few laughs over how messy the process was, and then enjoyed the fruits of our labor!
We welcome two of our newest employees, Mimi Ong, Tax Supervisor, and Lydia Gong, Tax Associate.
LvHJ held our first in-person social hour in July, and we had a great time catching up.
We are delighted to congratulate several of our hard-working team members for their recent promotions. Please join us in celebrating these extraordinary individuals: Jayshree Bhakta is promoted to Audit Manager, while Joy Garcia, Aubrey Sarfati and Jeffrey Wong are stepping up as Supervising Seniors. Thea Edolsa and Vicky Liu are promoted to Audit Supervisors, while Sherry Lu is promoted to Senior Audit Associate. In our Tax Department, Albert Luu is promoted to Tax Supervisor.
We welcome Gilberto Alcantar, who joined our firm as an administrative associate last month.
On March 17, 2021, we enjoyed a virtual team happy hour to connect and play the game, Taboo. As you can see, some of our gaming rounds were pretty hilarious.
We welcome Jia Tan as a new Audit Supervising Senior, who joined us in November. We also welcome Mimi Ong as a new Tax Supervisor who joined us in December just before the holidays.
Speaking of holidays, our entire team enjoyed a virtual holiday party and white elephant game in December. It was fun to see everyone and get into the spirit of a new normal for team celebrations.
We welcome Ali Nasir as a new Audit Manager, who joined us in September. Ali has a specific focus on LIHTC and New Markets Tax Credits (NMTC) for affordable housing developers and management companies.
August 2020
The LvHJ team took on an Exercise Challenge for the month, and we congratulate our winners. (The workouts challenge had various activities that counted as a workout.) Imagine, that many steps and workouts in one month! Way to go!
The Most Steps Walking Challenge
1st Place – Rita – 604,583 steps!
2nd Place – Albert – 292,443 steps
3rd place – Nivedha – 172,578 steps
The Most Workouts Fitness Challenge
1st Place – Charlotte – 235 workouts!
2nd Place – Amanda – 123 workouts
3rd Place – Jason – 121 workouts
We are pleased to announce the following promotions of team members in July, adding strength to our management teams in audit and tax services. Congratulations to you all!
Thea Edolsa – Senior Audit Associate to Supervising Senior
Joe Li – Audit Manager to Senior Audit Manager
Andy Ou – Tax Supervisor to Tax Manager
Lena Xu – Tax Manager to Senior Tax Manager
Selena Zheng – Senior Tax Associate to Tax Supervisor
This month, we welcomed Pallavi Raju as a Senior Audit Associate and Shelby Michels as an Audit Associate.
This month, we welcomed Eina Mazariegos as a Supervising Senior for the audit department. Eina brings six years of audit experience from her previous firm, four of those as a supervising senior auditor.
As our team continued to work from home, LvHJ scheduled some virtual events, including BINGO and weekly trivia! Virtual social events are a fun way to keep our team connected!
LvHJ’s team has been working remotely over more than a month in keeping with stay-at-home orders in California. We are closely following Gov. Newsom’s plan to ease restrictions in a few weeks, but rest assured that we are on call to help you with individual, business and not-for-profit questions by email or phone.
Join us in congratulating Amanda Lee, administrative associate, for six years with LvHJ! She joined us as an accounting temp during busy season in 2014 and now spends most of her time assisting our audit department.
We are happy to welcome Vicky Liu as a new Senior Audit Associate, Tracy Qiao as a new Tax Associate, Nivedha Srinivasan as a new Audit Associate and Jason Zhuang as a new Audit Associate.
Celebrating work anniversaries are Crisanto Francisco, Principal, with 17 years at LvHJ; and S. Scott Seamands, Partner, with 40 years at LvHJ. We are grateful for your skill and leadership.
Many of us got together for Happy Hour in February to kick off busy season. We try to have a monthly gathering like this to remind ourselves to balance play with work!
To augment our tax team leadership and gear up for the upcoming busy season, LvHJ added a number of new staff and interns. We are pleased to welcome new Senior Tax Managers Amy Woldemar, CPA, and Yvonne To, CPA. We also welcome Senior Audit Associates Aubrey Sarfati and Stevie Liu. Our new associates include Jin Kim, Audit Associate; Nicole Gao, Audit Associate; Logan Williams, Audit Associate; and Naishal Chokshi, Tax Associate.
LvHJ is also fortunate to have several new audit interns, including Sean Ly, Silvia Zhang, Robby Roekman and Leonard Lew.
We held an Affordable Housing Roundtable with a good response of virtual attendees. We discussed Change in GAAP for 2019 and the IRC Section 168(h) election. If you would like to hear more about these topics, contact Scott Seamands or Stan Woo. We have been doing these interactive sessions since the 1990s, and have evolved with technology to ensure we meet our audience where they are.
We celebrated in our new San Francisco office for the holidays with great food and fun games.
LvHJ attended the 30thanniversary celebration of BKR International as part of its Worldwide Meeting in Los Angeles. LvHJ is an independent member firm of this top international accounting association, offering a variety of resources to our clients.
LvHJ has moved its office to 301 Howard St., Suite 850, in San Francisco. We designed an open space concept with ergonomic and tech upgrades for the team. The building has an amenity lounge, a gym with shower rooms, 24/7 security, and easy access to public transportation.
LvHJ recently published a groundbreaking national report, the 2019 Affordable Housing Employee Benefits Survey. The survey polled leading and emerging affordable housing organizations on the full range of their benefit offerings, noting that this type of competitive data is not easily available to the affordable housing sector. View the report.
LvHJ is proud to congratulate Scott Smith, CPA and Joe Huie, CPA on their promotions. Effective January 1, 2018 Scott Smith was promoted to partner and Joe Huie was promoted to principal. Learn more about Scott and Joe.
We are proud to welcome new managers to our Tax and Audit teams. To learn more, visit https://lvhj.com/about/leadership/.
LvHJ Partner, S. Scott Seamands, CPA, shares techniques to clarify your unique story for lenders, investors and state and federal agencies. Improved financial transparency supports understanding and future access to capital.