Meet Fred – Finance & Management

I'm Fred Burry. I'm a special counsel here and also a director of what we call our Chief Counsel Scholars Program. And I've been here about, I've been with the Office of Chief Counsel about 10 years. This is my second tour of duty. The first time I was here about five years. I was legislative counsel for the IRS and spent a good deal of time up on Capitol Hill and also dealing with, not only dealing with legislation, but dealing with investigations and other types of projects around some of our regulations and other inquiries. I came back because I liked it so much. I'd spent an interim time as a partner in a large international accounting firm in the tax practice. And I just wanted to come back. I missed it so much. And so I'm back again now working with the Scholars Program. We have a variety of training programs, many of which I've helped to create, that deal with everything from trial training to various types of legal writing, legal ethics, a number of other things. But I'm very proud of the program that I'm associated with now. I'm the lead instructor, as I mentioned, in the Chief Counsel Scholars Program. It's like an internal LLM program, technical tax courses, dealing with a number of things. We've done courses in tax practice and procedure. I teach a course on a survey of international tax principles. I also teach a course on financial accounting concepts that not only looks at some of the financial accounting concepts that we need to know, but also some of the new book income taxes that we're dealing with, the one that is in our own Internal Revenue Code and one that is being developed internationally around us. Consolidated returns, employment taxes, tax treaties, and so on, partnership tax. These are all courses that look like LLM courses in a law school, and they're taught by either counsel instructors or by some external people that we deal with, either academics or from some of the law and accounting firms. And you can even earn a certificate that looks something like a degree. Hopefully, we'll get back to the point that we did before, where we can actually let some of those course credits transfer to an external LLM program, if you like. One of the great things about working here, and one of the reasons why I came back, is that you get experience here that you're not going to get anywhere else. As I said, I've been a partner in a large international accounting firm. I've also been a partner in a large law firm. I worked over at the Justice Department as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General. I've worked in some large trade associations where I did a lot of legislative work there. But the work that we get here in counsel is, whether you're working on the litigation side of our work or you're working on the technical and regulations and guidance side of our work, it's experience you're not going to get anywhere else. And I think it is something that even if you decide to stay or if you decide to move on to do other things, it's going to be absolutely foundational to almost everything you'd want to look at. And you'll not be able to recreate that experience really anywhere else. It really sort of accelerates your career path in many respects, some of the things that you'll be doing here, because the experience is so desirable, not only to help inside the organization, but to outside employers. We've found that a lot of our folks, we were sorry to see them go, but they really liked, their future employers really liked the experience they got while they were here.