Our principal goal in the tax consulting area is to act as trusted advisors to our multinational clients and provide day-to-day consulting on corporate, international, tax accounting, and other substantive issues. We understand the unique challenges faced daily by tax directors of public companies in the current enforcement-driven environment, including the pressures resulting from Sarbanes-Oxley legislation and the PCAOB, the tightening of standards in the accounting profession, and the IRS's policies of more audit currency and more assertions of penalties.
Since many of our large, multinational clients are regularly audited by the IRS, we are often asked to provide substantive tax advice on planning issues that are expected to affect either current or future audits. In that regard, our consulting and tax controversy attorneys work together to provide ongoing assistance to clients in managing the audit process and taking issues to IRS Appeals or pursuing other administrative options.
In our role as a “trusted advisor” to our clients, we are regularly involved in reviewing tax strategies provided to our clients by large accounting firms. In addition, through our representation of several large accounting firms in the tax shelter arena, we are quite familiar with many tax-driven structures and transactions and the various audit risks that are presented by such strategies.
As part of our Tax Consulting Practice, we closely follow the developments at the Treasury and the IRS, and we regularly appear before those agencies to obtain private rulings or seek changes in published guidance on behalf of our clients. In the past several years, the results we have obtained for clients include the following:
- Change in effective date of cross-border “A” reorganization regulations to prevent application of FIRPTA tax in foreign-to-foreign merger.
- Private letter ruling permitting mutual fund to recognize qualifying income from certain commodity-linked notes and avoid recent IRS published position that prevents funds from investing in swap contracts based on changes in commodities indexes.
- Private letter ruling permitting foreign corporate target to domesticate and then immediately engage in forward triangular merger that involved only 40% continuity-preserving consideration.
- Private letter ruling permitting corporation holding less than 1% of public company stock to engage in downstream tax-free “C” reorganization with public company.
- Private letter ruling permitting “S” corporation to “rescind” disqualifying investment in corporation by ineligible shareholder in order to preserve “S” corporation status.
- Private letter ruling permitting U.S. resident to expatriate without U.S. tax charge.