Santa Clara Valley Chapter: by the numbers.

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During the last calendar year, the Santa Clara Valley (SCV) Chapter, also known as the Silicon Valley Chapter, has been very busy providing professional tax education to TEI members and staff in the San Francisco Bay Area, while continuing the good work of sharing best practices and providing scholarships to local Masters in Tax students.

SCV Chapter Seminar Update

The SCV Chapter organized a dozen tax seminars providing over 11,000 hours of continuing professional education to our members and other tax professionals. In addition, the Chapter also cosponsored four events which provided an additional 6,000 hours of continuing professional education. In total, there were over 17,000 hours of professional education offered by the Chapter in the past year! Some seminars covered general tax focus areas including international taxation and transfer pricing, financial reporting, tax controversy, and state income tax. Other seminars focused on areas of interest to technology companies including software and e-commerce, stock based compensation, and the indefinite reversal criteria for foreign earnings. Attendance for these seminars ranged from 67 to 214 people at each event.

There were a number of high profile accounting firms and law firms that have presented at the Chapter events including: Baker & McKenzie, Deloitte, DLA Piper, Ernst & Young, KPMG, Latham & Watkins, Mayer Brown, Morgan Lewis and PricewaterhouseCoopers. A number of the seminars had multiple firms presenting. For instance, at our December financial reporting update, we gather the Big 4 accounting firms to provide technical income tax accounting updates and explain why, on specific issues, the national offices have differing views on certain tax accounting issues.

The seminars are planned by five committees, which generally mirror the TEI national committees, and include: Federal Tax led by Jane Adamo from Silicon Image; International Tax led by Cindy Duquette from SanDisk; 1RS Liaison led by Chris Therrien from Agilent; Financial Reporting chaired by Stephen Dumphy from VeriFone; and State and Local Tax chaired by David Slater from Intel.

Scholarships and MST Outreach

The Santa Clara Valley Chapter also has another important number, and it is three. We annually provide a $3,000 scholarship to one student from each of the three schools in the San Francisco Bay Area that offer advanced degrees in taxation: California State University--East Bay...