Spring greetings to all of our Tax Section members and friends. As my term as Chair begins to wind down, I want to take this opportunity in this column to discuss, among other things, some developments with regard to our Section meetings, as staff and leadership have been working hard to improve our meetings on a number of fronts.
We had an incredibly successful May meeting in Washington. It is fair to say that the “buzz was back” at the Marriott Marquis as our 1,900 participants benefitted from state-of-the-art CLE, productive committee activities, and outstanding networking opportunities. The Section owes tremendous gratitude to our staff and to our committee leaders for their efforts in support of the meeting. I want to highlight some of the May Meeting events.
At the Plenary Lunch on May 4 I was honored to present two Tax Section Awards to deserving recipients.
The Janet Spragens Pro Bono Award was given to Guinevere Moore. Gwen has been a longtime Section member and leader and she has been steadfastly committed to sharing her time and talents since the start of her career through the Section’s Calendar Call program and other pro bono activities.
Then, the Section presented its highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award, to Richard “Dick” Lipton. Dick has been active in the Section during the entirety of his long and celebrated career as a tax lawyer, including his work not just as a former Chair from 2001–2002, but also by serving for 34 years on Council including service as a Section Delegate to the ABA House of Delegates from 2005–2021 and now as a member of the Association’s Board of Governors. Dick has time and again demonstrated an intense dedication to the profession and the drive to change it for the better. He is a most worthy recipient of the Section of Taxation’s 2024 Distinguished Service Award.
Also at the Plenary Lunch, it was my honor to recognize and congratulate the 2024–2025 class of John S. Nolan Fellows:
The Section’s Nolan Fellowship recognizes upcoming leaders in the Section, and the Section is greatly benefitted from the service of these individuals as they begin to play a greater role in Section matters.
We held an informative luncheon Plenary Panel entitled “Taxation’s Role in Saving the Climate.” There’s nothing “immodest” about this title at all—given the billions of dollars in tax-related provisions implemented in the Inflation Reduction Act to reduce carbon emissions and promote climate policy. The role of the tax system in U.S. climate policy has become paramount, and the panel touched on many important aspects of how the IRA has been implemented. The thoughtful and content-rich panel was organized and moderated by Roberta Mann, the Section’s Vice Chair for Publications and a Professor Emerita of Law at the University of Oregon. Our distinguished speakers were Seth Hanlon, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Treasury for Tax and Climate Policy; Alice Lin, a Tax Policy Advisor at the Senate Finance Committee; and Amish Shah, of Holland & Knight LLP.
Finally, with respect to the May Tax Meeting a noteworthy innovation was a new addition to our programming. Motivated by a thought-provoking and candid discussion among around 50 attendees in San Francisco at the Midyear Meeting, we increased our “Live Well, Lawyer Well” programming to reflect the Section’s growing commitment to the interpersonal experiences of our attendees and to promote wellness and meaningful interactions among our colleagues. The programs we offered at the May meeting included a Jazzercise class taught by Section member Jaye Calhoun, a run led by Mike Desmond, a knit and crochet group led by Nina Olson and Judge Diana Leyden, a discussion on wellness in the workplace led by Gwen Moore and Brian McManus, a session on meditation and other practices to promote wellbeing sponsored by the Women in Tax Forum, and a quiet room set aside during the entire conference for meeting attendees to gather and decompress. Section leadership and staff hope that we are beginning a trend where the Section offers not just outstanding CLE and great networking but also opportunities for our members to enhance their personal wellness and meeting experiences while forming deeper connections with colleagues.
The Section is taking another step forward in meeting planning for the 2025 Midyear Tax Meeting. First—and I know how important our meeting schedule is to everyone reading this column— the dates of Midyear 2025 have changed from Thursday through Saturday January 9–11, 2025, to Wednesday through Friday February 19–21, 2025—still at the JW Marriott LA Live in downtown Los Angeles. The originally booked dates were simply too close to the holiday season, and it was a heavy lift to ask our members, after celebrating in December and over New Years, to turn so quickly and, for many of us, head across the country for the meeting. Many of our Midyear meetings in the past have taken place in mid-February, and we are excited to have found a more convenient time slot.
As to the shift to Wednesday through Friday, this was necessitated by hotel availability but we also see it as a useful experiment. As many of you will remember, we considered a permanent move to a Wednesday–Friday schedule before Covid and the many member surveys we conducted indicated that about half the potential attendees preferred to keep the traditional schedule and about half preferred to move off weekend meetings. This schedule change allows us to finally see how the weekday schedule plays out in reality. We will shift the plenary session to Thursday giving nearly all of our meeting attendees the option to make it home for the full weekend; we have heard from many of you over the years that this would be desirable. Stay tuned for more news about Midyear in the next few weeks.
I am also delighted to announce that the Section of Taxation will be taking over the annual Criminal Tax Fraud and Tax Controversy conference held every December in Las Vegas. This fantastic conference historically has been about criminal tax and tax controversy matters since it was founded by Jerry Feffer in the 1970s, and it has been a big favorite among many Section members, especially since its move to Las Vegas. Previously, the conference had been staffed and run by meeting personnel from the larger ABA. However, the meeting has always been, in nearly all respects, a tax conference where the conference leaders, nearly all of the speakers, and most of the attendees are active Tax Section members. Adding this vibrant conference to the Section’s list of CLE meetings means that our stellar meeting staff will plan and execute the meeting as they do so ably for other Section meetings, The registration fees will go directly to the Tax Section. The conference, which will continue to offer a slate of great networking events, is scheduled for December 12–14, 2024. I am delighted to report that we will return to the Wynn Hotel and Resort. Registration will open in June, so be on the lookout for our early bird rates.
When I had the honor of becoming your Section Chair, one of my primary goals was to look at our meetings in the post-pandemic environment and think about ways we could offer more state-ofthe- art programming and meeting environments to support our members and enhance the CLE, networking, and other benefits our meeting attendees receive. I am personally excited about these developments and changes, and I want to express enormous gratitude to our Section staff for their hard work in making these pivots, and to our Vice-Chairs, Council Directors, other leaders, and staff who have spent many hours considering and thoughtfully discussing these various moves. Our meetings are in many respects what define the Section’s most important objective—benefiting our members—and I look forward as we continue to change for the better.
I have been honored and inspired to serve as Chair during a year where the Section has turned a pilot project collaborating with IRS Chief Counsel Offices throughout the country into a deeply impactful pro bono program. We now host three joint Virtual Settlement Week events per year (in the fall, spring and summer) where often over 100 Section members and other tax professionals donate their time to help pro se petitioners in settlement discussions with the Chief Counsel attorney assigned to the case. The issues and backgrounds of the taxpayers vary widely between cases and come from a huge range of geographic regions. We have been overwhelmed by the response from volunteers in their generosity in sharing their time and talents, in the outcomes they have achieved for taxpayers, and in the outpouring of positive feedback from volunteers, taxpayers and our partners at the IRS. Because we pair volunteers who are new to pro bono representation with experienced volunteers, this program has also been an incredible training tool for newer pro bono practitioners, providing hands-on learning opportunities that a webinar never could equal.
On our website, you can find an approximate summary of taxpayer and volunteer numbers for each VSW week as well as some quotes from volunteers about the experience.
After a hugely successful Giving Day, where our generous members donated over $50,000 to enhance our Taxpayer Assistance Public Service (TAPS) endowment, we asked our members to dig into their pockets and engage in end-of-year giving to support the Section’s Justice, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (JDEI) endowment. Once again, our membership stepped up—with an incredibly generous match from the American College of Tax Counsel, we were able to raise $86,980 between September 1, 2023 and the end of the year. We are close to our initial goal of raising $1,000,000 for our JDEI fund, which will help to ensure ongoing financial support for the Loretta Collins Argrett Fellowship and other Section DEI-related programming and activities. As always, I ask all Section members—particularly those of us in leadership positions—to continue to support these incredibly worthy causes.
Speaking of the Argrett Fellowship, we are now accepting applications for the 2024–2027 Fellowship program. The three-year program supports our Argrett Fellows in meeting registration, travel and related expenses and provides mentoring for fellows from dedicated Section members. Many of our Argrett Fellows have spoken on Section panels and have served on the Section’s Diversity in the Profession Committee (DIPC). The program is open to any individual with a diverse background and/or a demonstrated commitment to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in the tax bar. The Tax Section aspires to award up to five (5) three-year fellowships each fiscal year.
Since the New Year, the Section’s Committee on Government Submissions, led by Michael Desmond and our Vice Chair for Government Relations Lisa Zarlenga, has been hard at work on a number of important comment projects regarding IRS guidance. We have submitted seven comments to Treasury and the IRS since January 1, detailed in the Government Submissions Boxscore.
The Section was also pleased to participate in a letter sent by ABA President Mary Smith urging that Congress increase the Child Tax Credit in H.R. 7024, the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024.
The Section deeply appreciates the hard work of the dozens of our members, our committee leadership, and our staff in developing the incredibly thoughtful and detailed comments. This is one of the Section’s great strengths as an organization.
Once again, I want to thank our incredible staff and our dedicated members who make the Tax Section the great organization it is. We have just completed a successful Latin American Tax Conference in a very rainy Miami (June 12-14), and then it is on to the Section’s Virtual Fall meeting during the week of September 23, 2024. I hope everyone has an enjoyable spring and summer!
