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09-21-07
 World
Class
Fifty-Five of the Most Influential Foreign-Born Atlantans
by Amanda K. Brown, Steve Fennessy, Tiago Moura, Phakisha
Peterson, Betsy Riley, Chandra R. Thomas, Kimberly Turner, Elizabeth Westby
Atlanta
Magazine
October 2007
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HA&W News Archive
Yelena Epova's
first job when she and her husband came to Atlanta from St. Petersburg,
Russia, in 1990 was working as a cashier at Cub Foods. Despite having earned
an engineering degree in Leningrad, she had never touched a computer. But
by attending night courses at Georgia State, she soon parlayed her love
of math into a more practical accounting degree. Upon graduation she achieved
the highest score on the CPA exam in Georgia and one of
the top 100 scores in the United States.
Now a partner
in Habif, Arogeti & Wynne's Tax Group, she has founded GlobalEXECWomen,
an Atlanta-based group for women working in international companies. Quoted
by media on topics from the euro to export incentives and consulted by countries
from Canada to Denmark, Epova is a recognized expert on international tax
issues. She is also an active volunteer at the Marcus Jewish Community Center.
Epova says
she has found Atlanta to be very accepting of immigrants. "I have never
felt foreign," she notes. "People were very interested in my background
... Atlanta is getting to be much more cosmopolitan. But I hate the traffic
and the hot summers."
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HA&W News Archive
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