Tax advice as a secret weapon in beauty contests is a neglected strategy,
according to this UK
tax solicitor. Of interest is her take that your tax department
should be more than a transaction support function—an unexciting
backwater full of competent drones—and should instead be viewed
as adding an ingredient of "alchemy" to a new-client pitch, in the form
of: "Hire us and the tax-efficient strategy we’ve devised for this
transaction will save you $X." (And consider setting a portion
of your fee to be a percentage of $X, something CPA’s have been doing
for a long time.)
What keeps firms from doing this? The obvious cultural reason
is that tax departments are not traditionally seen as glamorous new-business
drivers, but as soon as one recognizes that few things are more "glamorous"
to a corporate CFO than hard dollar savings, that attitude begins to
soften.
The more tactical reason is that tax advice is typically sought after
a the nature and structure of a transaction is fairly well set: At
which point optimally tax-efficient strategies may have already been
unwittingly precluded.
But the tax department will never in and of itself drive new business
wins, right? Well, consider incentive compensation schemes, which
are all about tax issues: And what grabs senior management’s
attention more compellingly than that?
