Thomas Attebery
Staff Writer
The College of Business has added the option for students who wish to pursue careers as tax experts to work towards a graduate degree in taxation. This is focused more specifically on taxation than a master’s in accounting.
Daniel Ames, a professor in the College of Business, says that businesses are looking for graduates with taxation degrees when they hire.
“Nationally and in metropolitan areas, publicly traded firms definitely need the tax help,” Ames said. “There aren’t really enough programs currently to fill the need on the employer’s side, so there’s usually a premium salary-wise for graduates of a M-tax type program and placement rates are typically very high.”
To find a job immediately after graduation in this field, companies expect applicants to have a graduate degree in taxation.
“Among the big four it’s become increasingly standard practice,” said Ames. “Smaller and medium-sized firms do really value the more generalist degree. It is still valuable and you can certainly still get a job with the big four, just not on the tax side.”
Those “big four,” companies are EY, Deloitte, PwC and KPMG.
Both Deloitte and KPMG have offices in the Boise area.
The program begins in the upcoming Fall semester and is expected to have about fifteen students participating in its first year.
“I am teaching two of the classes, one focusing on the fundamentals of tax, and a second class focused on advanced topics dealing with taxes on corporations,” said Ray Rodriguez, a college of business professor. “I’ll also serve as an adviser to students in the program.”
Rodriguez is one of four professors who are experts on taxation and will be in charge of teaching all of the master’s program courses.
Ames says that these four professors are part of what spurred the idea to bring a taxation program to ISU in the first place.
“Our dean was looking for new ideas, and a couple of us suggested this Master’s of Taxation as an idea,” Ames said. “But what really made it workable is that we had three new incoming faculty who were taxation experts, in addition to the one already here who was.”
Rodriguez and three others, Dawn Konicek, Jason Chen and Dave Bagley, will make up the teaching team of the taxation program.
“Dave and I just got back from a conference of taxation professors and other experts,” Rodriguez said. “And what we heard over and over again is that the accounting undergraduates have remained constant, and the master’s in accounting has skyrocketed in the last thirty years or so. Meanwhile the master’s of taxation has decreased dramatically, with some schools having even dropped it.”
What this means, according to Rodriguez, is that graduates with a master’s in taxation are now in higher demand than ever before.
“Basically the pendulum just swung too far the other way,” Rodriguez said. “The firms are saying ‘we’re not getting enough people that have advanced training and education in tax.’”
