About Us Benford Brown & Associates (BB&A) is a certified, minority, woman-owned CPA firm that provides auditing, accounting, tax and small business consulting services for its clients.  These services are designed to cover several industries with the focuses being in the not-for-profit, state and local government, higher education, professional service, mortgage brokerage and construction industries.

Alyssia Benford-Lee and Kimi Brown-Ellen founded BB&A in late 1996. Since its modest beginning, BB&A has grown exponentially while adding three partners, Timothy S. Watson and Michele D. Simon in Chicago and Katrina Battle-Bumpers in Miami, Florida. Although the partners of BB&A are young, they all have an average of 10 years of auditing and accounting experience.  Half of these years were spent with ‘Big 4’ accounting firms in the above listed industries and the other half was spent either within the internal audit departments or accounting departments of Fortune 500 companies.

The partners of BB&A have taken the best of practices learned in their prior experiences and added their own high set of values to formulate BB&A’s mission, focus and short and long range goals. Our mission is to provide audit, accounting, tax and consulting services that meet the highest standards within the public accounting industry.  We are committed to treating each client’s business as if it were our own thereby providing the care and attention necessary to help each client manage and grow their business and its resources. Lastly, we are committed to helping each of our clients increase their knowledge of their business and its accounting and finance issues.

We are focused on client service, which requires providing top-notch quality and adding value. In our short existence we have established a reputation of providing high quality and adding value.  An example is that approximately 90% of our individual tax clients experienced lower tax liabilities and/or received tax refunds based on tax planning/strategies suggested by us throughout the tax year.


Our partners are accessible to their clients. They bring their talent and experience directly to each engagement and maintain a ‘hands on’ approach to serving clients. This approach is the result of our commitment to being visible to our clients and maintaining open and consistent communication
 

Certifications

BB&A maintains the following certifications:

• Certified Public Accounting firm in the state of Illinois
• Certified MBE/WBE/DBE vendor for the State of Illinois, Cook County, City of Chicago, Chicago Public Schools, Chicago Housing Authority, City Colleges of Chicago, and the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority
• Certified Small Business Enterprise vendor for State of Illinois