Two Americans. Two sides of the Andes. One very American surprise.

Bright!Tax exists because the people who built it lived the problem first. But the real story starts before the tax filing, before the firm, before either of them ever crossed the Andes. It starts with the particular feeling of landing somewhere new and realizing your whole picture of the world just got bigger.

Greg Dewald felt it first. A university student from the States, on a scholar exchange in the UK, far enough from home to see home clearly for the first time. He’d later describe it this way: “All of these things had been through the lens of a young person who had never had the opportunity to see the world from a new and different perspective. Once I had completed my first adventure in the UK, I was forever changed.”

He never forgot that feeling. In 2010, he moved to Salta, Argentina, and built a life there. And then came the discovery that greets nearly every American abroad: your US tax filing obligation moves with you. There was no firm built for people in that position. So Greg built one. Bright!Tax was founded that year, in Salta, by an expat who had just found out the hard way.

A year later, on the other side of the Andes, Katelynn Minott moved to Chile. She had trained as a CPA at PwC, where expat tax was a technical specialty. But she hadn’t moved to Chile for the specialty. She had studied abroad there during university, met her husband, and gone back. When her own US filing came due in her new life, the technical knowledge was still there. The experience of being the expert who suddenly couldn’t answer her own questions was something she hadn’t trained for.

They met the way our clients meet us: remotely. Video calls and emails across a mountain range, two people who had arrived at the same problem from opposite directions. Katelynn joined Bright!Tax in 2012. Bright!Tax has been fully remote from that first call onward. Not retrofitted later. Built that way from the start.

In 2016, Bright!Tax launched the Global Scholar Initiative, a scholarship program funding American students studying abroad at accredited academic institutions. It exists because Greg and Katelynn know exactly what that first trip does to a person. Greg put it plainly: “I wish everyone could have the opportunity to experience the world beyond the American lens". The scholarship is that wish in action.

We did not pick expat tax off a list of specialties. We got here the same way you did.