The evolving role of the chief financial officer: as compliance, reporting, and BEPS become more complicated, so does the role of the CFO.

• Position: Base erosion and profit shifting, chief financial officer - Discussion

Channeling Kevin Bacon in the movie A Few Good Men, these are the facts, and they are indisputable: As the role of the chief tax officer (CTO) becomes geometrically more complex (see Roundtable No. 5, September/October 2015 issue of Tax Executive), so does that of the chief financial officer (CFO). At TEIs Annual Meeting in Dallas in October, at a plenary session moderated by Louis Mestier, vice president of tax at Hanger Inc. and chairman of TEI's Corporate Tax Management Committee, attendees heard a lively discussion among three CFOs on their evolving roles and responsibilities: Douglas Aron, executive vice president and CFO of Hollyfrontier; Daniel Cancelmi, CFO of Tenet Healthcare; and Biggs Porter, executive vice president and CFO of Fluor Corporation.

Mestier: Tell us a bit about yourselves and your company.

Aron: I'm the chief financial officer for Hollyfrontier Corporation, which is an independent refining company with five petroleum refineries throughout the United States. Were about a $10 billion market cap company with $15 billion to $20 billion of revenue, depending on a very volatile oil price. I also serve as the CFO for another publicly traded master limited partnership for which Hollyfrontier owns the general partner--that's Holly Energy Partners--and our tax department really works in a shared services kind of way to cover both of those different entities. We're based in Dallas. I've been with the company or predecessor companies for almost fifteen years.

Cancelmi: I'm the CFO of Tenet Healthcare Corporation, which is a public company. We manage eighty-seven hospitals and more than 400 outpatient centers throughout the United States and have operations in more than forty-two states. We also have a services business, which provides revenue cycle services to hospitals, physicians, and other providers. Tenet is about a $19 billion revenue company. We have more than 130,000 employees.

Porter: I'm the CFO of Fluor Corporation, which is the largest U.S. publicly held engineering construction company and one of the largest in the world. We operate around the world in about sixty-five countries, covering every continent except Antarctica. We build very large projects--refineries, petrochemical plants, LNG (liquefied natural gas) facilities, bridges, highways, power plants. We also have a group that serves the U.S. government and have several thousand people in Afghanistan. Fluor has had about $20 billion to $30 billion in sales over the last several years. We're very tied to commodity prices, and we do a lot of work for the mining industry as well.

Mestier: Can you give us an idea about the operations of your tax department?

Cancelmi: We have about twenty-five people throughout the country. It's led by Doug Raibi who's been with the company almost thirty years. Doug is incredibly well-qualified, and he does a great job managing our tax department. Most of the function is insource. We do outsource some property tax type of functions to some degree, but we're primarily insourced. We certainly look to our tax department for a number of different things, but first and foremost is accurate financial reporting and developing people in the department, and so certainly what you always need to take into consideration is succession planning. It's a highly complex area--tax--and it's important to train people and develop people.

Aron: We have all of our tax folks based here in Dallas at the corporate location. There are about fifteen to twenty people, led by Leslie Simmons, who has been in that role for awhile now and is doing an outstanding job of not just looking to minimize our overall tax rate but also looking for ways to become a profit center. And she's found, with her group, a lot of different opportunities for us either through jobs tax credits or other opportunities in certain states, in terms of accelerating depreciation, for example. Certainly something we think about on a strategic basis is involving the tax department and helping minimize that tax rate, thus improving profitability.

Porter: We have just under forty people in our tax department that's headed by Jim Lucas who, in addition to being a vice president of tax, is the treasurer of the company, so it gives him a little bit additional insight into both aspects of the job. Were fairly centralized--most of the work is done in Dallas or in the United States. We do have local controllers around the world who handle local statutory and tax return reporting, but most of the broader oversight occurs out of Dallas. We do outsource, similarly to what Dan said, property tax and sales tax work, but otherwise all of the significant analysis and transactional strategy work happens out of Dallas. Of course we try to keep them very integrated in the business so they can optimize the effective tax rate, but...