USC team participates in national tax competition

Two third-year law students recently helped earn USC a rare trip to the national Deloitte Tax Case Study Competition.

Karin Harwood and Alexis Petas – both JD/Master of Business Taxation students – joined MBT student Kevin Brown and accounting/MBT student Janet Lin to compete in the nationwide interscholastic competition for undergraduate and graduate tax students.

Clockwise, from bottom left: 3L Karin Harwood, Patricia Mills, Kevin Brown, 3L Alexis Petas, Janet Lin. The students placed 3rd in the national Deloitte Tax Case Study Competition.

The grueling, five-hour competition required the students to analyze information taken from a real-world-based problem that included areas of tax such as corporate, international, partnership, individual, trust and estate. The team received copies of the Internal Revenue Code and Treasury Regulations to cite in their written solution submitted to a panel of judges from Deloitte Tax LLP.

“We got a 20-page problem with 18 different questions,” Harwood said, “so there was a lot of collaboration between the four of us on the team – spotting issues and analyzing problems – and then we wrote 18 memos within that five-hour period.”

The team finished third in the competition, receiving $250 per member and $2,500 for USC. The College of William & Mary won for the second consecutive year. Other schools participating in the finals were Brigham Young University, University of Central Florida, University of Denver and Ohio State University.

Harwood and Petas said their experience as JD students gave them the research and writing skills needed during the competition. Among their tax-related studies at USC Law, Harwood took a tax course and conducted directed research for Dean Edward J. McCaffery; Petas took Adjunct Professor Robert Tippet’s wills, trusts and estates course; and both were taught by Professor Tom Griffith.

Harwood said the key to their performance was “having that substantive knowledge, along with the practical skills of issue-spotting and taking law school exams and writing memos under time pressure.”

The students were recruited to the team by Leventhal School of Accounting Associate Professor Patricia Mills, who taught their tax research class. Since both Harwood and Petas will be practicing some aspect of tax law when they graduate, they wanted to take advantage of the exposure. Twice a week, they met with Mills or other Leventhal professors for mini-lessons on different areas of tax law.

“We definitely got to learn about a lot of different areas of tax that we might not have been exposed to otherwise,” Petas said. “We really learned a lot from the professors.”

After receiving a JD/MBT next May, Harwood plans to work with Deloitte Tax in L.A., while Petras will join Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman in Palo Alto, Calif.