Functioning in Chaos, Olga Brochstein

What happens when an information systems graduate gets handed a sales tax audit and a tax engine implementation before she has ever filed a return?Olga leads indirect tax at Avanos Medical, a medical device company recently acquired by private equity. She studied management information systems at Wayne State University and fell into sales tax when a small Detroit company she interned at got hit with a Michigan assessment. Her path since then runs through Citrix, Ryder, RockTenn during its WestRock merger years, and Workday. She treated each stop as a deliberate step in a field with no formal degree behind it.Together they explore how tax engines like Vertex depend entirely on the data your ERP feeds them, why use tax often creates more audit exposure than exemption certificates, and how AI first entrants are pushing indirect tax professionals toward advisory work while states expand sales tax on SaaS and digital products.Olga also explains why she left a sales tax manager title at WestRock and took a pay cut to join Avanos as it spun off from Kimberly Clark. It meant building the sales tax function from scratch, through an SAP to S/4HANA migration and a Vertex upgrade, and years later that process held up under private equity due diligence. She closes with an audit that ended in a minimal assessment and a thank you email from the auditor. Tune in for a conversation about building a sales tax function that survives audits and acquisitions.