Participating in TEI's technical activities: your how to guide.

• Position: Recent Activities

TEI is unique because its members live daily with the tax rules others enact, administer, interpret, and apply. TEI's advocacy program is successful because it is based on member input. The Institute needs your help to remain effective.

WHAT? Advocacy is simply the means by which TEI advances its objectives by communicating its concerns and by recommending changes and improvements to the tax rules. TEI's principles are advanced through testimony, submissions, amicus briefs, and other means. TEI advocates on matters affecting business taxpayers as a whole, but avoids positions unaligned with its overall objectives and narrow issues that could divide the organization. Recurring themes include minimizing compliance burdens, simplifying complex laws and regulations, reducing tax barriers to multinational companies, and opposing disproportionate penalties. TEI's efforts are increasingly diverse, extending beyond federal efforts in the United States and Canada, to state and provincial submissions, filings with the European Commission, the OECD, European governments, and recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission.

HOW? TEI members may raise an issue in multiple ways--through their chapter (officers, committee chairs, or chapter representative to TEI's Board), region (regional vice president), Institute-level committee, TEI national leadership, or a simple telephone call or email message to TEI's staff. An issue need not...