Robert Duquette

Teaching Full Professor

Accounting
Office: RBC 447
red209@lehigh.edu
215-275-0189

Courses Taught

Auditing
Advanced Federal Income Taxation
Fundamentals of Federal Income Taxation
Intermediate Accounting I
Intermediate Accounting II
Introduction to Financial Accounting
Introduction to Managerial Accounting
Accounting for Decision Making (Graduate)
Financial Reporting and Analysis (Graduate)
Financial Reporting for Managers and Investors (Graduate)

Professor Duquette has been teaching at Lehigh University since 2009, first as an adjunct, and most recently as a teaching full professor in the accounting department. He has also been a full-time instructor in the state university system until accepting a full-time position with Lehigh. He holds a BA with highest distinction and high honors in economics (1975) and an MBA of highest distinction (1976), both from the University of Maine, Orono, where he earned membership in three honor societies, including Phi Beta Kappa, Beta Gamma Sigma, and Phi Kappa Phi. After graduation, Professor Duquette became a CPA, and served in public practice for over 30 years, primarily with Ernst & Young (EY), where he started in their audit practice until becoming senior audit manager in 1984. He then transferred to their tax consulting practice in 1986 after graduating from their accelerated tax training program in their national tax office, where he was that year’s highest-ranked graduate in a program designed to be the equivalent of a master's in tax degree. He was elected to the partnership in 1990 and began serving as EY’s managing tax partner for central Pennsylvania until 2002, during which time his practice was consistently ranked first in performance for the entire eastern region. In 2002, he was named the leader of the Philadelphia area transactions tax practice and taught in the National EY University career path training program, until his retirement in 2009. Since then, in addition to teaching, Professor Duquette has consulted part-time to local, regional, and national CPA firms, and most recently serves as a member of the Griffin/Stevens & Lee Tax and Consulting Network and is CPA-Of Counsel to William Koch & Associates.

Over these almost 20 years as a partner, Professor Duquette specialized in mergers and acquisitions and was responsible for leading and growing a tax practice of over 20 tax professionals, including the overall quality control of the advice, preparation, and review of all significant tax opinions, the coordination of all client tax services, deal structuring, review of all deal-related agreements, due diligence of target company tax history and disclosures, and the coordination with financial and legal due diligence teams. Over his career, Professor Duquette advised on over 300 corporate transactions, both domestic and cross-border, aggregating over $50 billion in volume for large Fortune 1000 companies, and many middle market companies, and mostly with cross-border operations.

Professor Duquette has also served on the board of directors of his local chamber of commerce, the national boards of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the Institute of Management Accountants, and has led his Pennsylvania Institute of CPAs statewide and local federal tax committees, including and especially as co-chair, researcher, publisher, and speaker representative for their federal budget and tax reform subcommittee. In this role, Professor Duquette has distinguished himself in the region as one of the experts on the implications of the federal national debt and the role of tax reform. His research and presentations at professional conferences are consistently ranked by participants as the highest-rated and most insightful. His research and presentations uniquely focus on the substantial misconceptions and misleading information surrounding the topic of the national debt and tax reform; review the relevant facts regarding what’s driving the national debt and the complexity of tax law; presents the debt forecast and implications of inaction; and discusses the leading proposed solutions and their implications. His work is frequently published in the Pennsylvania CPA Journal, and in other publications.

Robert Duquette

Teaching Full Professor

Courses Taught

Education

Practice Areas

Review Acknowledgments

Awards

Robert Duquette

Teaching Full Professor

Courses Taught

Biography

Background

Education

Practice Areas

Publications

Additional Information

Review Acknowledgments

Awards