The numbers add up

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 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 PHOTO/?MICHAEL SALERNO

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

Born in East Providence, Fillion, 55, of North Kingstown, 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 Fillion tick – and has led to her reputation in the health care sector within the accounting world – 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 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.”

BlumShapiro processes thousands of tax returns and has about 400 clients for its traditional financial and regulatory reporting services, as well as nontraditional services such as what Fillion offers in health care, which is about one-quarter of the total business, she said.

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.”

Even though she is in touch with clients all year long, the heavy lifting in her job typically starts when those clients’ year-end financial statements come in. And while it starts with math, it’s more about analyzing the information and consulting with clients, she says.

“I look at results, forward planning, feasibility; succession planning; facilities,” she said. “It runs the gamut and it’s very individual. Because of the size of the clients – we have $10 million to $30 million [firms] – sometimes they need almost day-to-day help, so we get really involved in helping them make business decisions.”

In long-term care, the market in Rhode Island presented a need for accounting services, Fillion explained. Medicaid money is typically tight and it’s important to help clients get the most out of the potential state and federal benefits, she said.

Serving the developmentally disabled evolved as the firm developed its health care services. Most of these nonprofits are funded primarily through Medicaid, Fillion added.

“We started with one client,” she recalled. “I’m very proud of that group of clients because the original funding system didn’t really force them to be that in tune with their financials. Now, they are all very astute. They know their numbers because they’re dealing with a very wide demographic from children to elderly clients.”

In fact, that was one of her most important accomplishments in 2011: when the R.I. Department of Behavorial Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals announced a major change in the way agencies would be reimbursed.

The impact was “profound,” Fillion says, but she instituted meetings between the firm and clients’ financial groups, putting systems in place in advance to produce accurate and timely billing statements, she said.

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.”

That condition highlights another attribute Fillion has which she calls stubbornness. In fact, the attribute is more like persistence, she admits, since she has been able to persevere.

“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.” •

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