About
Licensed CPA. Fifteen years in tax, restructuring and complex multi-entity accounting. Greenwich, Connecticut. My practice is now devoted to one thing: building the complete financial picture for women facing divorce, before counsel is retained and before anything is contested.
Apply for a private consultation01 What I actually do
I establish what is there.
Every account, entity, property, plan and policy in a marriage. Compensation reconstructed across salary, bonus, deferred arrangements and equity. Business income examined for the difference between what is reported and what is actually distributed. A defensible figure for what a household costs, built from twelve months of records rather than recollection. Assets and liabilities reconciled so that nothing in the file contradicts anything else in it.
Then I explain it, in plain language, to the person whose life it describes — so she is the most informed person in the room rather than the least.
That is the entire job. It is accounting work, and it belongs at the beginning.
02 How I came to do only this
Most of my career was spent on work that sounds unglamorous and is not: businesses carrying several entities, ownership that changed without the books noticing, intercompany balances that never tied, years of filings left undone. Reconstructing a financial history from incomplete records, and standing behind the result, is a specific skill. It is what I am good at.
Divorce work found me through that door. A marital estate is the same problem — scattered records, entities, income that is not what it appears to be — arriving under a deadline, with far more at stake.
What I noticed was the timing. Almost everyone arrives too late.
Clients come to me having already retained counsel, already filed, already agreed to something. Almost always with the same sentence: I didn't know I could ask that.
It is not that their attorneys did anything wrong. A family law attorney argues the case you bring them. They are not accountants, they do not reconstruct a decade of records at $500 an hour, and they proceed with whatever picture their client walks in holding. If that picture is incomplete, the case is built on it anyway — and those decisions are difficult to undo.
So I stopped taking that work at the end and started taking it at the beginning. That is the whole change, and it is the reason this practice exists in the form it does.
03 How I work
I explain what I am looking at without assuming you should already know it. Not knowing is not a failing — in most marriages one person handles the money, and that arrangement is frequently deliberate.
If the numbers are worse than you hoped, you will hear that from me first rather than from someone across a table. If your position is stronger than you think, you will hear that too.
Women going through this are handled a great deal — by attorneys, by institutions, sometimes by a spouse. That is not what happens here. If you need particular arrangements around how and when I contact you, say so and I will follow them exactly.
04 Credentials, and their limits
I am a licensed Certified Public Accountant. That is the credential I hold and it is the only one I will claim.
I am not a forensic accountant, not a certified fraud examiner, not a credentialed business valuator, and not an attorney. If your matter requires courtroom testimony from a credentialed expert, or a formal valuation that will be challenged, you need the person who holds that designation — and I will say so plainly and help your counsel find them.
Nothing on this site is legal advice, and reading it does not create a client relationship.
I say all of this early because the alternative is worse. A professional who is vague about the edges of their expertise is telling you something about how they will handle your money.
05 Practical matters
Where. Greenwich, Connecticut. Engagements are handled by appointment, and much of the work is done from records rather than in a room.
How to reach me. Email only, at cathryn@salonylarsencpa.com. It is answered personally. There is no assistant, no intake queue and no automated sequence.
How many. Six engagements per quarter. The work does not compress well, and a client who is one of thirty is not receiving what she paid for.
Confidentiality. Client identities are never published, and the representative engagements described elsewhere on this site are anonymized. If you need to be contacted only at particular times, or only at a particular address, say so in your first message.
Private consulting applications are open. Every application is treated with complete confidentiality.