How Prepared Are You?

• Author: Silvestri, James
• Position: President's page

As we gaveled to a close TEI's 69th Midyear Conference, I wanted to express my gratitude and appreciation to the 500-plus in-house professionals who joined us in Washington, D.C., to our outstanding speaker and moderator cadre who guided us through our program agenda, and to our sponsors for their continuing support of TEI's educational mission. Together, we explored the broad range of issues that confront us as we manage our day-to-day portfolios as well as continue to navigate the questions and quandaries of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). That journey will no doubt continue to present challenges for us and the departments we serve, most immediately in terms of TCJA interpretation, implementation, and compliance.

Yet beyond the near-term challenges of "what number goes on line x of form y," "how to file," and "what to report" type of questions, what looms ahead in the long term may be just as challenging. How ready are we to defend the inevitable disputes that will arise several years down the road about the positions and interpretative decisions we have taken today? Put another way, how well have we documented and memorialized our decision making about our TCJA-related return positions? How effective are we being to manage, store, retrieve, and analyze the volume of data that support those decisions? TCJA-related tax disputes are inevitable, from all the taxing authorities having jurisdiction over your business operations. The complexity of the TCJA and its correlative impacts at the state and international levels will undoubtedly make those disputes even more challenging, as taxing authorities could well be emboldened by that very complexity to stretch reasonable interpretative limits. Indeed, while one former senior U.S. tax policy official offered his belief that "reasonable positions, consistently applied" should or could be an acceptable standard, especially in the absence of dispositive guidance, or when multiple plausible albeit competing interpretations exist, I have yet to see that reflected in the 1,500-plus pages of TCJA regulations.

Preparing for those inevitable tax controversies should be on everyone's work agenda--today. What steps should we be taking to create or revise existing work streams to prepare, preserve, and store the volume of documents and data that support our TCJA-related positions? Questions along these lines which have always informed us as in-house professionals loom even larger in this context. What do...