Angela Wallace.

• Position: Sonic Corp. senior tax director - Interview

Angela Wallace didn't just jump right into tax.

One month after graduating from college with a bachelor of science in biology, Wallace and her husband started their family. She chose not to pursue her plans to become a physical therapist.

"I waited tables for four years because it provided flexible hours for my husband and me to trade off raising our son instead of having him in day care," Wallace explains. She spent a lot of time deciding what she wanted to study before she went back to school. "I would come home late from work and read financial magazines and balance my checkbook to wind down and relax, so I chose to study accounting. Everything just seemed to make sense in my first principles of accounting course, and I realized I had chosen the right field this time. It was the same with my first tax course. The reading and coursework were fun, and I seemed to have the skills necessary to be successful in a tax career," she says.

Her career has certainly been successful. Wallace, the senior tax director at Sonic Corp., the largest chain of drive-in restaurants in the United States, has had to deal with some challenging issues. During her first few years at Sonic, the restaurant side of the company switched from about 700 company-owned stores operated as separate legal partnerships to about 400 stores reported as cost centers within the corporate structure. "Calculating and reporting the tax effect of re-franchising 300 stores was a large and unusual transaction for the accounting and tax departments. The year following the largest of the sale transactions, the remaining locations merged into the corporate entity. This required a reconciliation of the outside partnership basis to the inside basis of the assets.

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"The successful completion of this project is one of my biggest career accomplishments to date," she says.

The first obstacle, she says, was identifying why the basis reconciliation did not balance. "Two of us in the tax department spent countless hours analyzing the data and finally realized that some of the book data did not represent what we thought it did. That was when I learned that GAAP accountants and tax accountants do not always speak the same language. The next obstacle was determining how to obtain the data necessary to compute the accurate tax basis. This was complicated by some system limitations and other issues, but we were able to problem-solve and obtain what was needed. I still apply...