The Trump Tax Law Is Creating Lots of Jobs — for Tax Professionals
Taxes

The Trump Tax Law Is Creating Lots of Jobs — for Tax Professionals

Jonathan Ernst

The GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act may not be working as promised, but it’s certainly helped generate plenty of new jobs for tax lawyers and accountants, The Wall Street Journal’s Richard Rubin reports (paywall). Deloitte Tax LLP grew by 10 percent this fiscal year and expects to again next year, according to Rubin, while KPMG LLP says it hired twice as many veteran tax pros as it did the prior year. “The joke I heard is that some people are calling it the ‘Tax Jobs’ and Cuts Act,” Rubin says.

  • “Tax-reform legislation and all the implementing guidance have been very good for tax practices,” David Noren, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery, tells Rubin. “It’s created just a whole lot of new complexity and it’s given us mountains of new guidance to figure out and to deal with.”
  • “What we’ve got is a system that is even more complex than the old system, and the consequence of that is it’s requiring a lot of time and effort on the part of our clients and us,” Pamela Olson, U.S. deputy tax leader at PwC, says.

As part of the industry hiring spree, Rubin writes, “Accounting firms, law firms and trade groups have been snapping up the Republican congressional staff members and Treasury Department officials who worked on the law and regulations.”

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