What Can You Do After Big 4 Tax Job?

Big 4 tax.

Here's what I've seen others do:

Start your own tax practice Work at another tax firm Do corporate tax for an F500 Become CFO of a small company (only saw one instance of it, and it was for a tax heavy industry being real estate) Go get your law degree/MBA and switch to something else

Not saying these are your only options, but this is what I saw after my big 4 experience.

I know someone that moved into a boutique investment banking as an analyst.

Yea accounting sucks. The second you step into the big 4 people perceive you as a fungible bean counter. not much better in IB but at least you'll make more than a postman.

Thank very much. I have BA for my undergrad. I'm doing MS tax. If I want to go into Tax, which group should I go into in big 4? Is there any big difference between the groups, which will affect your future career?

If like working in tax and have studied tax then I think you should apply for a bartending position.

Since no one here seems to be offering any sort of advice, I'll give it a shot but I'm not a tax guy (did a brief rotation in there during my big 4 days).

In my big 4, Fed Tax was the biggest group by far. Other groups (i.e. SALT, international, M&A and individual/trust) had a few staff, and would borrow staff from Fed Tax during its down time. Based on that experience, it seems that Fed Tax would be a general place to start, and you'd have the option of moving into one of the other groups later (I had a friend who did Fed Tax and went over to work exclusively on M&A Tax after a couple of years).

Not sure if this is the case at all Big 4s. I'd ask the logistics/structure of the groups at each respective big 4 before making a decision.

All big 4's have a tax M&A practice that won't bore you to death. They can be pretty rewarding at the partner level too.

First person I've heard of who actually WANTED to do tax...for most friends it was a backup backup plan.

Hudge Fund tax officer.

Thanks for the real great advice.

Sorry to hijack this thread, but I'm interested as well. What are the career prospects like if you decide to just stay on with your Big 4? What are the compensation and responsibilities like for a tax specialist at the MD/Partner level?

This article has some decent info about tax exit ops

http://www.cpahaven.com/public-accounting-exit-ops

I was interested in tax as well, and from what I collected, if you go into tax your best options are to stay in tax. This isn't necessarily bad because tax offers a variety of outlets such as M&A, international, small business, partnerships (this is probably one of the most complex areas), individual tax, etc. In tax your more successful by specializing, so that is usually how the career progresses. After a lot of experience you can also be a CFO in the industry you specialize in, but that is not as common as becoming the tax director for a firm.

Here are my two cents:

If you're not a tax lover (it seems you're not, otherwise you wouldn't be posting this thread) and you'd like to work with the areas of tax that are more related to numbers, finance and/or accounting, you should be considering these ones:

1) M&A Tax (Transactions Tax): within this department you'll be involved in the same deals the people in corporate finance are, but you'll analyze the deal from a tax perspective. At my B4, the floors are divided into Tax, Audit, and Consulting, but the M&A Tax sit together with the Consulting practice, since their job is more project-based and they work hand in hand with them. As someone above said, is one of those quantitative areas within tax. Note that "quantitative" means working with numbers "accountingly", nothing related to complex mathematics. 2) International Tax: even though case law is kind of important here, it is mostly creative accounting so as to minimize the tax bill. At my firm, they basically try to structure financial hybrids that have a different treatment under tax rules, relocating businesses to jurisdictions with lower corporate tax rates, etc. 3) Transfer Pricing: if you're keen on numbers, economics, and finance, this is the most finance/quantitative area you'll find at a B4 within the tax practice. As a matter of fact, I met accounting people that changed from audit to transfer pricing. This area deals with the intercompany transactions that are performed within a multinational company. The work may consist either in compliance or in planning. It is somehow related to international tax, but these people work separately. Just as an example, at my firm there is a financial services/transactions team that are specialized in pricing intercompany debt, structuring cash-pools, pricing derivatives, and so on. This team has no true tax people (nor law people), the partner is a CFA, one guy is a Msc in Finance, other one is a MA in Economics from NYU, etc.

When I had to choose, the most satisfactory thing I did in my research was to search in LinkedIn for people working at these areas. Even though there could be some exaggerations or missing information, you will get an idea of what sort of profile works at that department, as well as what type of work they're doing.

Cheers.