Tax Section Odyssey

By: AICPA & CIMA
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  • Summary

  • Keep your finger on the pulse of the dynamic and evolving tax landscape with insights from tax thought leaders in the AICPA Tax Section. The Tax Section Odyssey podcast includes a digest of tax developments, trending issues and practice management tips that you need to be aware of to elevate your professional development and your firm practices.
    ©2023 Association of International Certified Professional Accountants. All rights reserved.
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Economics Management
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Episodes
  • Finding your passion for tax with Tony Nitti

    Finding your passion for tax with Tony Nitti
    Dec 19 2024
    "The tax industry is a gift for people who want to learn and grow and be challenged. There's never going to come a day where you close volume two of the code and say, 'I figured it all out, I know what it all means now.’” Tony Nitti, Partner — EY National Tax In this final episode of 2024, Tony Nitti shares his journey within the tax industry, emphasizing the importance of finding one’s passion, investing in oneself and overcoming personal challenges. Listen as Tony shares his personal experience and practical advice for career growth and fulfillment in the tax profession. What you’ll learn from this episode: · Finding Your Passion: The importance of identifying and nurturing your specific passion within the tax industry, whether it's the law itself, client relationships, or running a firm. · Invest in Yourself: The value of investing in your knowledge and skills by learning, writing, and teaching the tax law. · Overcome Challenges: Strategies for attracting and retaining talent in the tax industry by providing intellectual challenges and growth opportunities. · Try hard things: The benefits of overcoming fears of public speaking and using writing as a tool to communicate complex concepts and share your passion. Resources S Corporation Shareholder Compensation: How much is Enough?, The Tax Adviser, August 2011 Note: This was the article referenced in the podcast written by Tony. In August 2012, it was the winner of The Tax Adviser’s 2011 Best Article Award. Transcript April Walker: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Tax Section Odyssey podcast where we offer thought leadership on all things tax facing the profession. Today, I'm excited to be here with Tony Nitti. Tony is a partner at EY National Tax and he's a frequent guest on the show. We were just chatting about we think this is maybe the sixth time he's been with us. We appreciate you being with us. Our topic today is not a techie topic. It is a soft topic, but I think an important one. Tony, you did a session at National Tax which was just a couple of weeks ago, on finding your passion in tax and it incorporated some technical topics. But today, we're just going to lean right into the finding your passion. I think we, as listeners, we just want to hear your story, tell us more about how you started and got where you are today at National Tax at EY, which is pretty impressive, I must say. Tell us more, Tony. Tony Nitti: It's good to be here with you, April. I will also say I admire your bravery, because like you said, we just did this National Tax a couple weeks ago, or at least a shorter version of it you just went charging full speed ahead and said, let's do a podcast before we get our hands on those evaluations. We might just be doubling down on a disastrous decision. April Walker: Never know. Tony Nitti: Nobody wants to hear, but that's not the hope. Obviously, the hope is that something here will resonate with people who are listening who maybe are just struggling to find their center and find their passion within their careers. But if it's all right with you, I always want to address what I consider the elephant in the room of the conversation like this before we get started. When we talk about this passion for tax, when we did it at National Tax, when we're doing it today, we're talking about a specific type of passion for this industry. What I mean by that is this idea that people are lured to the tax industry as I certainly was by a desire to live in and learn the law. Because we take one look at that tax law and we realize that it's something that's not solvable, and we want to spend our careers being challenged and being forced to grow and learning that law and apply it to our clients. But that's not the only passion you can have in a tax industry. This passion for law, you probably need to learn the law regardless of your passion, but I've met many people in my career who have a very different passion than me. People whose passion is client relationships, building a relationship that lasts for decades, other people whose passion would be to run a firm someday because they want to prove that accounting can be done differently. Those are extremely valid passions and we don't mean to discount them, but we're focusing today on a passion for the law. Learning and applying the law, and we're doing it for two reasons, I think. Number 1, at the AICPA, we're keenly aware of the challenges we have attracting and retaining talent. And specific to retaining talent, we just see all these good people at all levels of experience, leave the industry and as they're on their way out the door, they say, You know what, I got into this industry because I wanted to work in the law. I wanted to solve complicated problems for sophisticated clients and be forced to think on my feet. Instead, for the first four years of my career, all I've done is prepare the ...
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    59 mins
  • Tax talk 2025 — Policies, provisions and perspectives

    Tax talk 2025 — Policies, provisions and perspectives
    Dec 13 2024
    Note: This podcast episode was recorded Nov. 20, 2024, and since then, the U.S. House of Representatives races have been called, giving the Republicans 220 congressional members and the Democrats 215. This balance could change depending on potential special elections if some members of the House are appointed to positions within President-Elect Trump’s administration. In this episode of the AICPA's Tax Section Odyssey podcast, Kasey Pittman, CPA, MST, Director of Tax Policy ­— Baker Tilly US LLP, discusses potential upcoming tax legislation for 2025, focusing on the complexities and challenges of extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and other tax provisions. What you’ll learn from this episode: The potential complexities and challenges of extending provisions of the TCJA and other tax legislation.The implications of a unified government and the reconciliation process for passing tax legislation.The financial constraints posed by the national debt and the importance of managing the deficit.The influence of individual policymakers and the importance of state and local tax (SALT) deductions.Potential revenue raisers like tariffs and ending the employee retention credit early, and their impact on the overall tax legislation. AICPA resources Planning for tax changes — CPAs need to not only brace for tax law changes such as the TCJA and expiring provisions but also be proactive in planning for them. Tax advocacy — Advocacy is a core element of our purpose and value proposition. It is a strong mechanism for promoting trust and confidence in the CPA and CGMA credentials around the world. Transcript April Walker: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the AICPA's Tax Section Odyssey podcast, where we offer thought leadership on all things tax facing the profession. I'm April Walker, a lead manager from the tax section, and I'm here today with Kasey Pittman. Kasey is the director of Tax Policy with Baker Tilly's National Tax Office. Welcome, Kasey. Kasey Pittman: Thank you for having me. April Walker: I thought we'd spend a few minutes today setting expectations for tax legislation for 2025. First, a little bit of a spoiler, tax legislation is likely, right, but what it will actually entail is probably a lot more complicated than just a straight status quo extension of TCJA. Kasey, let's set the stage a little bit and talk about what we know about the makeup of the government and what that will mean for upcoming legislation. Kasey Pittman: I think going into the election, the vast majority of people assumed we were going to wind up in some divided government. We knew it was very likely that Republicans would capture the Senate. The math there was not very good for Democrats, just in terms of how many seats were up, and one of the Democratic-turned-independent retiring senators from a deep red state was almost a certainty to flip. I think the general thinking was that either Democrats would capture the White House or the House, and neither of those things came to fruition. We are sitting here in the 2024 election was a Republican sweep. We've done a lot of worrying about things that we can let go of, and I think probably we'll touch on that a little bit later in the podcast. But the margins aren't very big. Trump captured the White House actually by a good margin in terms of both electoral votes and total votes in the country. It looks like Senate Republicans will have the majority with a 53-47 split between Republicans and Democrats. The house is currently unknown. We know that the House has captured 218, and that's what you need for the majority. There's 435 seats. 218 is literally a one seat majority. There are five races outstanding, and probably threeish, maybe four of those are likely to go Republican. We're just waiting on final vote counts. In the House, we're looking at a few vote margin, in the Senate, we're looking at a few vote margin, and that can make legislating really difficult. One of the themes we touch on here as we go through is reconciliation. When you have a unified government, and a unified government is one where one party has both chambers in Congress, and the White House, which is what we're going into in 2025, there's this process that you can use for certain types of legislation, fiscal legislation called reconciliation. What reconciliation does is it allows you to overcome the filibuster in the Senate. You actually only need a simple majority, like 51 votes in the Senate to pass a bill, but anybody can hold up a bill with a filibuster, and you need 60 votes to end debate and force the vote on the floor. But this type of legislation doesn't require that, so we can move forward with a simple majority. However, there are a lot of limitations to the reconciliation process. Everything in a reconciliation bill has to be financial. It needs to deal with spending or revenues and it can't be incidentally related to those. That has to be ...
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    25 mins
  • 2025 tax preview: Perspective from an AICPA tax policy advocate

    2025 tax preview: Perspective from an AICPA tax policy advocate
    Nov 26 2024
    In this joint episode with the JofA podcast, host Neil Amato discusses with Melanie Lauridsen, Vice President of Tax Policy & Advocacy for the AICPA, what tax practitioners can expect regarding tax legislation. The conversation covers key tax topics following the 2024 election, including the future of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), beneficial ownership information (BOI) reporting, and disaster relief efforts. Melanie provides insights into the challenges and opportunities facing tax professionals in 2025, emphasizing the importance of staying informed. What you’ll learn from this episode: The latest updates on disaster relief for BOI reporting. Melanie’s insights about the potential future of the TCJA provisions. How IRS funding might be impacted by the new administration AICPA resources Planning for tax changes – CPAs need to not only brace for tax law changes such as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and expiring provisions but also be proactive in planning for them. Tax Advocacy – Advocacy is a core element of our purpose and value proposition. It is a strong mechanism for promoting trust and confidence in the CPA and CGMA credentials around the world. Transcript April Walker: Welcome back to the AICPA’s Tax Section Odyssey podcast, where we offer thought leadership on all things tax facing the profession. I'm April Walker, lead manager from the Tax section, and today we have a joint episode with the JOA, providing information on several important tax topics, such as BOI, disaster relief, and also upcoming potential tax legislation. Let's hear more. Neil Amato: Welcome to the Journal of Accountancy podcast. This is Neil Amato with the JofA. This episode is a special collaboration between the JofA and the Tax Section Odyssey podcast. It's Nov. 19 as we're recording, two weeks since the 2024 election. With the election over, we have results. We also have questions about the future of several tax topics. Here to provide some analysis and clarity on those topics is Melanie Lauridsen, vice president–Tax Policy & Advocacy for the AICPA. Melanie, welcome back to the podcast. Melanie Lauridsen: Thank you for having me back, Neil. Amato: We talk pretty regularly, pretty much a quarterly basis. It's safe to say that even if we keep this discussion fairly narrow in scope, there is plenty to discuss, so we'll get right to it. I'm going to tease for the listeners that there will be discussion of the future of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. But first, I'd like to ask about BOI reporting, beneficial ownership information reporting, as that's been in the news lately as well. What's the latest from your lens, the advocacy lens, on the topic of FinCEN's disaster relief for BOI? Lauridsen: Good topic, Neil. Disaster relief is something, regardless of what it is, whether it's tax or BOI, it is critical that people are able to get it as quickly as possible in the largest scope possible. With BOI, we are grateful that FinCEN did offer disaster relief for victims of various hurricanes, most notably Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene, which created quite a bit of damage to the areas they hit. But, unfortunately, the scope of the relief, particularly for those victims of Hurricane Helene, is not as broad and as encompassing as we would have liked it to have been. They did offer a filing relief for those victims. However, they didn't extend it to entities that had been created prior to 2024 and therefore had a Jan. 1, 2025, deadline. We know that [for] some of the entities, it took everything away. It destroyed everything, and those entities have years to rebuild, and they really could use an extension. With that in mind, we are actually working with various state CPA societies, and we are also working with FinCEN in order to broaden the scope that was issued, in particular for victims of Hurricane Helene. Of course, we are working with people on the Hill because there are a lot of questions around the Corporate Transparency Act and BOI reporting to begin with, much more so also with disaster relief that they would like to see some expansion of the scope, too. Amato: Yeah, and on that topic of the reports that are in versus the reports that are expected, it's still a pretty small number. I know people like to do things at the last minute, but it's something like 6.5 million of 32 million, so still a long way to go. Lauridsen: There is an awareness issue there, and FinCEN is highly aware that there is an awareness issue because, like you said, 6.5 million filings of 32.6 [million], there's a little bit of a disconnect, especially when we're in November. So we're talking there's a month and a half to file to meet those other — what is it? — 20-plus million filings that we have to go in 1½ months? I don't think they're going to be able to meet those numbers, so, yes. But a couple of things to note about that 6.5 million. Of those 6.5 million, the majority of those filings are ...
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    18 mins

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