Taxes: Where planning ahead pays off;

              pleted and a joint House-Senate report
issued December 23. "Now we knew
what changes we had to make," re­called
Milt Kupfer, partner who has
responsibility for overall coordination
and direction of H&S tax work. "We
had a week to work with the final re­port
while we waited for the President
to sign the law. When he did, on De­cember
30, we immediately sent the
Tax News to the printer."
Easier said than done. The Wash­ington
Office, which is in daily contact
with the government, necessarily had a
key role in getting the word. In a
three-day span following passage of the
act, ten anxious practice offices had al­ready
been on the phone trying to find
out in advance the positions the new
law would take on such matters as cap­ital
gains and bank operations.
Monday to Wednesday following
Senate passage of the bill was "very
hectic," said Clay Chandler, tax part­ner
in the capital. The bill was signed
on Tuesday morning and then came the
One of the more controversial Christ­mas
gifts of last year was a new Tax
Reform Act that tax specialists say is
every bit as sweeping in its changes as
the reform of 1954—and perhaps even
more so. The signing into law of the
reform bill, coming as late in the year
as it did, imposed a sudden sharp pres­sure
on the Firm's tax specialists to di­gest
the new provisions, to try to fore­see
the likely interpretations of less
clearly defined features, to anticipate
the most immediate impact of the act
on clients and the Firm, and to explain
the whole package to clients and staff
alike.
It was a frantic end-of-year time for
our tax people, a complicated interplay
of logistics and coordination that
starred the Executive Office and Wash­ington
Office tax departments in the
role of battle commanders rallying to
hold the front. It was a campaign
they had trained for since last summer.
Formulation of the battle strategy
began in August when the House of
TAXES
Where Planning Ahead Pays Off
Representatives passed a bill calling for
changes in the nation's tax system. As
the bill began to move through Senate
hearings, H&S staffers kept close
watch. After the Senate Finance Com­mittee
reported the bill in early Decem­ber,
work was started on drafting a
special issue of the Haskins & Sells Tax
News which would be a cogent sum­mary
of the new legislation. Jim Ristau
and Jack O'Keefe, principals in the
Executive Office, did the major work
on this report, with help from Frank
Carolan, a tax principal in the Phila­delphia
Office, and Rick McDowell, a
Washington Office senior. Congres­sional
discussion of the bill was com-