Fordham team’s tax smarts render them Texas-bound

Accounting , Event Recaps Students | Nov 12, 2013 | Nicole Gesualdo

Five Fordham business students are headed to Deloitte University.

That’s not a hot new MBA program you haven’t heard about. It’s the site of the finals for the Deloitte-sponsored FanTAXtic Case Competition, and it’s in Texas.

Fordham’s team is headed south to the finals after winning the New York regional competition. The Fordham squad will compete in mid-January against eight other tax teams from all over the country. At stake are some serious prizes, including the first place award, which would send each student home with $2,000 and bring an additional $10,000 home to Fordham.

We are already wishing the best of luck to Shannon McKenna (GSB ’14), Stephen Falzone (GSB ’15), Brock Wilson (GSB ’16), Leona Lam (GSB ’16) and their GBA counterpart on the team, Jessica Wang, who will win prizes for themselves and for Fordham just for advancing to the nationals.

We also congratulate the other Fordham team that competed in the New York regionals, the only team to earn honorable mention: Syeda Hussain (GSB ’14), Michael Ambrose (GSB ’14), Jackson Mills (GSB ’16), Tiffany Lee (GSB ’16) and their grad-student member, Cloris He. For their honorable mention, each student receives $200, and Fordham gets $2,000.

This year’s case study required the teams to offer tax advice on a number of complex matters:

• How to structure a joint venture
• The best organizational structure to accomplish a business’s expansion into a new state
• Which state the business should expand into, considering the states’ varying tax apportionment and incentive credit regimes
• How the business’s accounting for income taxes would be affected by proposed income tax law changes

“The competition was even more challenging than in the past,” said Professor Stanley Veliotis, who acted as co-advisor for both teams with Professor Paul Kushel. “In prior competitions, the sophomores on the teams — who have not yet taken a tax course — were able to contribute by focusing on giving less tax-technical business advice to the client. In this case, every team member had to roll their sleeves up on very complicated tax matters.”

Professor Veliotis said the sophomores did a great job in the “crash courses in tax” they received as part of the competition preparation.