Mr. Urish is Managing Partner and Founder of Urish Popeck & Co, and Co-Founder and Director of Ridge Global Solutions a cyber risk advisory firm. He is immediate past Chairman of the Professional Ethics Committee of the PICPA, and he serves as Trustee, Board of Directors and Chairman of the Audit Committee of BlackRock Equity/Liquidity Funds. He is a past board member of Inter-Tel, formerly a publicly traded multi-national telecommunications corporation, and past president of the board of Pittsburgh Catholic newspaper. He is a founding member of the Accounting Advisory Board, Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University.
A Certified Fraud Examiner, Mr. Urish has significant due diligence experience, including with the financial services, healthcare, real estate, construction, food processing, manufacturing, and minerals & extraction industries. His litigation support experience includes fraudulent conveyance and embezzlement, shareholder lawsuits, business interruption, economic loss, and fraud auditing and forensic accounting.
Mr. Urishs professional experience encompasses audit, internal audit, corporate governance, business valuation, and mergers and acquisitions/due diligence. Mr. Urish has been a Certified Fraud Examiner since 1993, and his industry experience includes real estate, retail, manufacturing and distribution, energy, financial services, insurance, technology, healthcare, and higher education. He is a frequent speaker and attendee at conferences on governance topics including emerging cyber security issues, and interacts with the SEC, PCAOB and other regulatory entities. Mr. Urish leads the assurance initiative to validate the Standards for Reporting MBA Employment Data, the process that leading US and international MBA programs use to ensure their data is ethical and reliable. His professional publications include an article on professional ethics published in the Pennsylvania CPA Journal, and co-edited Financial Management and Analysis: Methodologies to Manage and Improve Operating Performance, which was adapted as a business development seminar series sponsored for several years by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvanias Department of Community and Economic Development. Mr. Urish is specifically approved by the states of Vermont and Utah to audit major captive insurance companies; he has led the audit of a Fortune 500 company captive.
Mr. Urish was honored as Penn State Alumnus of the Year for Accounting in 2005. He shares his professional experience through lecturing, chairing conferences, appearing as a panel member, and delivering keynote addresses for various professional organizations, including the Beta Alpha Psi National Accounting and Finance Honor Society. Other speaking engagements have included the Pennsylvania Bar, the Ohio and Pennsylvania Institutes of Certified Public Accountants, Ohio State University, The Pennsylvania State University Smeal Graduate School of Business, the University of Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Graduate School of Business, Robert Morris Associates, and other forums and conferences.