Liren Wei Is Serving The Profession While Building A Booming CPA Firm

Liren Wei, CPA

Firm: Wei and Wei and Company, New York City, Partner

Forbes Ranking: America’s Best-In-State CPAs 2025

Liren Wei’s rise to the top of the CPA profession began in an unlikely place: the dentist’s chair. Today, Wei is both Managing Partner of Wei, Wei & Co. and Director of the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants. But following high school, Wei—born in Taiwan, raised in New York—had enrolled in a six-year dentistry program in Tapei. It was only during that program’s final year that Wei, finding himself unfulfilled, opted to change course, returning to New York City to earn a Bachelor’s in Business Administration from Baruch College.

His passion for the new work showed. Wei elevated his admittedly mediocre dentistry grades to graduate Summa Cum Laude from Baruch—and dentistry’s loss became Certified Public Accounting’s gain.

Wei began his accounting career as a staff accountant at Wei, Wei & Co., a firm his father started in their family basement, and in addition to serving as managing partner the past 30 years, he’s gone on to take charge of the firm’s SEC practice and government accounting and auditing practice. Those government clients include a diverse array, including the New York City Department for the Aging, Department of Homeless Services, Administration for Children’s Services, Human Resource Administration, and the New York State Affordable Housing Corporation. Wei’s area of expertise have grown to include financial, internal control and compliance auditing, financial due diligence, mergers and acquisitions. And the firm has grown as well, now boasting offices on Madison Avenue and Chinatown in New York City as well as in Los Angeles and Beijing.

Perhaps as a result of his circuitous journey into the profession, Wei is well aware of the obstacles on the road to becoming a CPA—and has devoted himself to helping others find their way to the field. He is one of the founding members of Ascend (formerly the National Asian American Society of Accountants), designed to enable its members to realize the leadership potential of Pan-Asians in global corporations. Today, Ascend reaches 20,000 people with 28 student chapters and 16 professional chapters in the U.S. and Canada, and its efforts have clearly yielded results. According to the AICPA Trends Report 2023, Asian, Pacific Islander and Native Hawaiians hold 9 percent of accounting degrees, exceeding the 6.2 percent they represent of the U.S. population.

Indeed, Wei advocates the CPA profession for not just math wizards, but anyone who aspires to lead a major corporation, citing a Fortune 500 study that found 38.5 percent of CEOs of the 500 had some kind of accounting background. “John D. Rockefeller started out as a bookkeeper, and J.P. Morgan started as an accountant,” he says. And as Wei well knows, where you start your professional journey is often far from where it ends.

For the full list of Best-in-State CPAs, click here.

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Steel Rose, CPA is a senior editor who covers accounting, with a frequent focus on recognizing the top practicing CPAs in America in addition to investigating stories about audit failures.