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Michael Pitts is a successful young executive, but it wasn’t always his intention to reach a high rung on the corporate ladder.

“Accountants divide up the profession between industry and public accounting,” he says. “I always saw myself in public. But there were changes in the accounting function following Enron with Sarbanes-Oxley that put a lot more importance on the tax function within corporations that wasn’t there before, and that made industry much more appealing.”

The work is just more challenging and important than it might have been, he says. For example, Amedisys used to outsource its tax department to a large accounting firm.

“They never really thought about tax planning or tax impacts of transactions,” he says. “It just wasn’t something on their radar. Sarbanes-Oxley kind of forced it onto their radar, and once it was there, especially after I got here [in 2005], they began to realize there were a lot of planning opportunities that they had been missing.”

Amedisys often is acquiring other companies, and Pitts says he’s played a bigger role than his employer expected in managing the tax consequences of those transactions.

Pitts also is executive director of the Christen Foundation, through which Amedisys might write 1,000 checks a year to various charities. It’s his job to gather applicants, filter through the applications, make recommendations to the board and make sure the checks are prepared and delivered. As a health care company, Amedisys tends to focus on health-related causes, but it does consider others.

“We give for the sake of giving. It’s not a marketing tool for us,” he says.

Pitts says the success of Amedisys comes from all 500 of its agencies across 35 states, so the company tries to spread its giving to causes the employees care about. But he doesn’t just hand out money; he makes a point to get involved.

“Anything that we give a lot of money to annually, I try to get personally involved in that,” Pitts says. “If we’re going to support your cause, we want to support it physically, visibly and financially.”

Age: 34

What is Baton Rouge’s biggest strength in the quest to attract young professionals?

“LSU is a huge draw. The culture of the city. I didn’t realize when I went to Birmingham the cultural differences and how much I missed that when I was away.”

Click here for the complete list of 2008's Forty Under 40 winners.