Words of praise for TEI's international tax course: following TEI's international tax course in August, one of the students - Diana Wochinger of Hewlett-Packard-Europe - wrote HP's senior vice president, tax (and former TEI President) Lester Ezrati about the program, which has been a mainstay of TEI's continuing education curriculum for many years. Ms. Wochinger's message is excerpted below.

• Author: Wochinger, Diana
• Position: Tax Executives Institute

Just having come back from [TEI's International Tax Course], I am still excited about it. I had some concerns that my MBA in International Taxation would somewhat overlap with the content of the course. However this concern was without any reason--the course really helped me to get the '"full picture." So my educational background helped me a lot to get along with this and thus to be involved in the open Q&A sessions and discussions.

Besides the content of the course (which was really fantastic) and the speakers who really gave their best, TEI's organization was excellent and gave a lot of space for networking as well! (A dinner at the first night, a reception the day before finish.) I met great people with whom I will stay in contact with as we had very interesting discussions....

The seminar started with Welcoming Remarks by Dan Goff. It was funny because I had never met Dan in person when he was working for HP. So we had a really good chat in one of our breaks and he seems to be pretty up-to-date with everything going on with HP!

After having an introduction on the development of International Tax Law & Policy, which also included comments on the coming election of Obama vs. McCain and the possible impacts on the tax politics in the future, Anna Voortman from E&Y held a session on the Sections 861-863 which covered both general rules and special rules which were covered later during the week.

On Tuesday, besides discussions on the calculation of tax credits, I had a very good session on E&P. Both concepts (tax credit calculation and E&P) are rather unknown to me, as I have only worked with tax concepts of civil law countries which follow the concept of the tax exemption method....

The next day started with one of the best sessions I ever had--James P. Fuller talking about Subpart F.... Bringing the difficult elements and regs of Subpart F onto one page [meant that] every one of the 187 participants finally fully understood the regulations...