La Salle Is One of Five National Finalists Who Competed in Annual PricewaterhouseCoopers Extreme Accounting Challenge

Named one of five national finalists in PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ xACT Competition, La Salle’s team members are: (left to right) Tim Snyder, Pat Schmidt, Lauren Juszczuk, Chris Hanson, and Nick Keene.

A team of La Salle University accounting students is one of the five national finalists who competed in the PricewaterhouseCoopers’ annual Extreme Accounting (xACT) Challenge. As one of the finalists, the five-member team has been awarded a $10,000 prize.

The five finalist teams—La Salle University, Hampton University, Louisiana State University, Villanova University, and the University of Illinois, which was named the overall national winner—earned berths in the National Finals by first winning xACT competitions on their campuses. The five teams were then selected from a pool of the 42 winning campus teams and awarded $10,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to New York City.

Launched by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2002, xACT is a case competition that tests the critical thinking, team-building, and presentation skills of hundreds of the best undergraduate accounting students from colleges and universities around the country.

The xACT competition is invitation-only—schools must be invited to participate in the competition by a PricewaterhouseCoopers’ partner. Jeff Boyle, 1988 La Salle graduate and a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, was integral to La Salle receiving its invitation to participate in the competition for the past three years.

Members of La Salle’s winning team are, senior Chris Hanson from Southampton, Pa.; junior Nick Keene from Nashua, N.H.; junior Tim Snyder from Atco, N.J.; sophomore Lauren Juszczuk from Bensalem, Pa.; and sophomore Patrick Schmidt from Philadelphia.

“They should be very proud that they were named a national finalist considering La Salle has only been in the competition for three years,” said Susan Borkowski, Ph.D. Professor of Accounting and faculty advisor for the team. “There are many schools who have been competing since the xACT’s inception who haven’t made it this far. I think that speaks volumes about our business curriculum and the students’ work ethic.”

The National Finals were held at PricewaterhouseCoopers’ headquarters in New York City in January, culminating months of preparation and weeks of competition among 418 teams from 42 top colleges and universities across the country. Overall, more than 2,000 undergraduates participated in this year’s Challenge.

The final five teams were required to present their case solutions to a real-world accounting issue, which focused on evaluating two financial options for a fictional United States-based energy company, to a panel of PricewaterhouseCoopers national and New York leaders who hosted and judged the competition.