Campus to clients: Tax Court in the classroom.

• Author: Hutton, Marguerite R.

One of the goals of higher education is to provide students with professional skills that will help them prepare for future success. One of the most significant challenges for educators is to improve students' communication, analytical, and research skills. This column describes an exercise in which students combine all these skills in mock Tax Court. In this exercise, students research a basic tax issue, write a research memorandum, and orally present the issue in a "court session" in class. For each issue, one student represents the taxpayer, while another student represents the government. Tax practitioners from the community act as "judges" for each court session. This exercise has successfully and significantly assisted students in improving their communication and analytical skills and has proven instrumental in helping them prepare for their professional careers in accounting.

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Mock Tax Court has had a significant positive impact in the tax research and planning course taught at Western Washington University, where the exercise is used to conclude the course. Preparation for mock Tax Court requires students to use the tax research and planning skills developed throughout the course, analytically plan a strategy for their cases, and argue the issue orally before the class and an accounting professional who acts as judge for the court session. The students are not evaluated based on the judge's decision but by the entire class on vocal clarity, whether their presentation is easy to follow and makes sense, their persuasiveness, the completeness of their argument, and whether overall the argument was presented well.

This method has been shown to have major benefits to all the students, since members of the class benefit not only from their own research and presentation but also from their observation of the oral arguments provided by the other students.

Overview of the Course

Tax Research and Planning, the course in which the mock Tax Court exercise is used, is a senior-level undergraduate tax elective, which has a required prerequisite of a basic income taxation course. The course is offered once per academic year and generally has an enrollment of 24-32 undergraduate accounting students.

In the course, students are assigned to "consulting groups." Each group consists of four or five students with diverse experience, problem-solving abilities, and course backgrounds. Throughout the course, students perform individual tax research on a portion of each assigned research case and then integrate the individual research results for each case into a group memorandum (executive summary), which includes planning strategies for the case. Communication, analytical, and research skills are developed as research case...