The evolving education of tax professionals: trying to meet corporate needs for more well-rounded students in changing times.

• Position: Discussion

The education of tax professionals has never been as important--or as complex. Tax laws and regulations are proliferating, the international tax scene is burgeoning, online education is on the rise, and, according to some observers, many students expect different educational experiences. In November, we convened a roundtable to explore these issues with a group of international tax educators, including Glenn Aquino, director of the Illinois MS Tax Program, which is based in Chicago and affiliated with the College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Joshua Blank, professor of tax law, vice dean for technology-enhanced education, and faculty director of the graduate tax program at New York University School of Law; Ian Holloway, professor and dean of law at the University of Calgary in Canada; and Kees van Raad, professor of law at Leiden University and director of the International Tax Center Leiden. Tax Executive Senior Editor Michael Levin-Epstein moderated the roundtable.

Michael Levin-Epstein: How has tax education changed in the last five to ten years?

Glenn Aquino: The way it has changed--I'd say it's relatively interesting from my perspective, because this program was started eleven years ago. It was started because a lot of the tax practitioners in corporate tax environments, as well as public accounting, were finding that the depth and breadth of tax expertise, or the exposure to various different areas of taxation, was not happening like it did in the past. That's primarily because the emphasis and focus became more and more on specialization, whether it be multistate taxation, international taxation, etc. So, you have people entering the profession, and they go right into these specialty areas without having the exposure to the more general areas of tax, which, in the past, would provide you a good foundation. In the past, you'd progress from being a generalist to a specialist, and over the course of time it sort of flipped and you became a specialist and needed to get the general background through whatever means were available to you.

Kees van Raad: In the early 1960s, the Dutch government decided to open at the University of Leiden Law School the possibility to specialize in tax law. At that time, law school was five years, with the first three years pretty much the same for all students, and the last two years to be spent on a specialization. To the existing specializations at Leiden University Law School in civil law, public law, criminal law, etc., tax law was added in 1964. As a matter of fact, I was among the thirty or so students that enrolled in that study, to graduate five years later in law with a tax specialization. While those two full years of tax law were pretty comprehensive, at that time international tax was hardly covered. The success of the Leiden University tax program resulted in the 1970s and '80s in virtually all Dutch universities inaugurating a tax program, sometimes not only in their law school but also in their faculties of economics. In those law school programs tax students would get additional training in accounting, economics, and public finance. And the tax curriculum offered to economics students would include in addition to tax law also quite a bit of general law. So tax graduates from law schools (about eighty percent of those specializing in tax) and from schools of economics (twenty percent) would in the end be quite comparable. Over the years the Dutch universities have delivered annually between 300 and 500 tax graduates--quite a number for a small country like Holland, with only seventeen million inhabitants but a very open and international economy. Occasionally, our tax specialty also increased Dutch exports: in the 1990s when there was a great shortage of tax solicitors in the UK, Dutch tax graduates were lured by major UK firms to move to London to start working there after completing a crash course in UK taxation. After my graduation in tax law in Leiden and an LLM at Georgetown University, I worked for a few years with the Dutch Ministry of Finance before joining Leiden in 1975 as a junior faculty member. I was appointed there in 1986 as a specialized international tax chair, the first of its kind at the time. Over the years, my teaching and research visits to the United States and other countries inspired the idea of creating at Leiden University a specialized international tax program, catering particularly to foreigners from countries with limited or no opportunities for academic training in the international tax area. This resulted in 1998 in the board of the law school of Leiden University accepting my proposal to establish a postgraduate program in international tax under the umbrella of the International Tax Center Leiden (ITC Leiden), which was set up to accommodate the program. This advanced LLM program in international tax law has developed quite successfully over the years, attracting a large number of...