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Should I hire a CPA or should I hire a tax attorney? So the answer to that is it depends on what the situation is. That depends on the cast of characters on your team and what their level of experience is and it depends on how you want to solve the problem. So what I will say generally is with people within an organization and with CPAs, a lot of those people don’t have sufficient multi-state tax background. Just because I’m a tax attorney doesn’t mean I’m an estate planning specialist or I know a whole bunch about estate tax. It doesn’t mean I know a whole bunch about foreign transfer taxes. There’s a variety of things that are tax that are not in my wheelhouse as a tax attorney. Multi-state taxation is something that’s in my wheelhouse but the reason it’s in my wheelhouse is because I practice in this area of law and I do this all the time for clients who are multi-state businesses. A lot of CPAs and a lot of internal company people don’t have that level of experience so regardless of who you decide to hire, you want to make sure that you’re hiring somebody with sufficient experience to solve the problem. Now in a lot of cases, not all cases, but tax attorneys generally cost more than CPAs. We usually bill out at a higher rate so it’s also important to assess the problem and determine what solution you need. If it’s a simple reporting issue and you have a good multi-state CPA, that person might be the most appropriate person to handle it. Alternatively if you’ve got somebody in your company who has run a multi-state tax department or who has a background, you’re probably better handling it in house but the problem with multi-state taxation is it’s not just about the law. The law is complicated because you’re dealing with multiple jurisdictions. It’s about the procedure and it’s about how states handle collections and enforcement action against taxpayers that are outside of their jurisdiction and it’s about understanding the playing field. On the landscape of that, oftentimes what I usually recommend is a multi-prong approach. I’m a big believer in efficiency for companies so what I tell them is look, engage with the tax attorney, figure out what the strategy is and then outsource the execution of that strategy to where it makes the most sense. So a lot of multi-state clients, for example with our firm, come in for consultations. They’ll sit down with me, we’ll go through 60 or 90 minutes and we’ll develop a strategy and then they walk out of the office or hang up the phone and we’ll take that strategy to their internal people or to a CPA and help them execute it. So when making this decision, you want to make sure that whoever you’re going to have lead the team has the appropriate level of experience and then try and subdivide the work among who it makes the most sense to. Some people prefer to have our office handle everything and that’s okay but what I try and do for our clients is promote efficiency and really it’s about spreading and dividing labor between those three buckets of people on your team and doing what makes the most sense for your organization.

You know, well that’s a broad question. It obviously depends on the facts, depends on how much trouble you’re in and it depends on how much work we’re going to do. So the answer to that is I can’t tell you off the bat but what I will tell you is my hourly billing rate is $525 an hour, our junior paralegal bill is at $150 an hour and then the rest of our attorneys and staff are somewhere in between. For most multi-state taxation issues the important part is strategy. So a lot of clients come to us and we’ll do a consultation we do a paid consultation. We’ll sit down for 60 or 90 minutes and we’ll develop a strategy and then in some cases, that client can just go off and execute that strategy and they don’t need us any further. Some clients after that strategy session, after we’ve built the plan, want us to stay and help execute the plan for one reason or another. So in those situations we usually bifurcate the work between our senior attorneys which are anywhere between $350 and $525 an hour and then our paralegals which are anywhere between $150 and $225 an hour. From a cost perspective the most important thing that I like to stress is efficiency. So I certainly don’t want to bill anybody any more than I have to. I don’t want to bill them any less than what it takes to get the job done but I’m a small business owner myself and trust me, I understand cost. One of the benefits of the way that I look at cost is I’m approaching this from a small business perspective. I want to make sure clients are getting value for the services that we’re providing. I want to make sure that

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So if you’ve watched some of the other videos in the series, I think you’ve kind of gotten a flavor for how I look at multi-state tax issues but let me just summarize. Number one I don’t believe in just jumping in. What I believe in is really taking the time to develop a strategy that makes sense for a business. I run a small business myself, I’m aware of the challenges that come with businesses and I’m aware that the legal decisions that get made for a company aren’t the driving factor. A lot of times the business has to do what’s best for itself, so my approach is always business first. It’s about taking legal decisions or tax decisions and framing that into what makes the most sense for the business. You know I’m certainly going to argue for being in compliance, I’m certainly going to argue for mitigating risk from a legal perspective, but I’m not going to sacrifice the profitability of a business. To do that we’re going to have to find a compromise sometimes. So our approach generally is about building a strategy and then really it’s about the efficiency in execution of that strategy. It’s about taking the client’s resources, whether they’re a small company or whether they’re a multi multi-million dollar corporation, it’s about taking those resources, it’s about taking the resources of the CPA firm that they have, about taking the resources of any bookkeeping that they have whether internally or externally, and the way that I look at this from our firm’s perspective is we’re kind of the quarterback of the team. The client is in charge of dictating what needs to be done but we go out and we help execute that. We’ll certainly offer advice, we’ll certainly offer guidance and direction and what we think is best in order to help our clients make the best decisions they can, but the client runs the show and it’s our job to not only execute the strategy that they want us to, but do so in the most efficient way. It’s not about just plugging away and getting things done although that certainly is important. The important thing is what is the best thing for the business, where is the business best served by taking the strategy that we’ve developed in step one and translating that across the business? Is there way that we can implement the tax strategy into the client’s sales process so that the salespeople or the resources that the client has are keeping them out of trouble? What are other ways we can work with the client’s business processes to make sure that what we’re doing is most effective? And then most commonly with multi-state issues, where are areas that we can save the client money? There are a lot of areas that most clients miss when they do that. So oftentimes, clients will retain us on a matter and what we try and do with our expertise is to bring as much value as we can to that individual client situation. We’re always a fan of trying ideas, of trying to mitigate costs and try to do the best thing for our clients so that’s generally the approach that we take when we handle a multi-state tax matter.