The International Tax Program—Reflections on the First Two Decades

The International Tax Program—Reflections on the First Two Decades

Description

Except for the Class of 2002, when I was on sabbatical leave, I have taught the core U.S. cross-border material to all twenty ITP classes. Several ITP students have also been in my course in partnership taxation and in a seminar on cross-border acquisitions, arbitrage, and currency issues. For better or worse, all ITP students have taken at least four credits from me, many two or five more, and a select persecuted few a full eleven credits (nearly half of their course load). I am aware of only a handful who have abandoned professional tax practice, and it has not been suggested, at least in my presence, that my teaching was instrumental to the defections. So, if nothing else, I feel poised as well as anyone to comment on the experience of instructing the ITPs, as they are known casually, in the horrors of U.S. income taxation. During the first third of its existence, Paul McDaniel created and ran the program; David Rosenbloom has now been at the helm for the ensuing two thirds. The very first class was Eurocentric, nearly two thirds of the students hailing from Western Europe. Over time, Asia, Central and South America, and, to a lesser extent, Africa filled the ranks. The current class reflects the global trend. As academically distinguished as the ITPs have always been, the prospect of gaining proficiency in the most complicated tax system in the world, one radically unlike the home-country systems they are familiar with, in a foreign tongue they have studied but typically not regularly spoken, is beyond formidable. The first few class sessions are a dip in a freezing ocean of debatable principles, strange concepts, and inordinately technical rules, at a depth that most of the students are not accustomed to. Written on their faces is worry that coming to NYU might have been a mistake. I try to dispel the anxiety by explaining, how convincingly I'm never sure, that they will be lost during the first several weeks but that eventually they will catch on. And, to their amazing credit, nearly everyone does.

Source Publication

ITP@20 [1996-2016]

Source Editors/Authors

H. David Rosenbloom, Igor Alexandre Felipe de Macêdo, Amanda Kazacos, Francisco Lisboa Moreira, Carlo U. Olivar

Publication Date

2016

The International Tax Program—Reflections on the First Two Decades

Find @ NYU

Share

COinS