BY DANIEL HOOD
All tax, all the time
From the ashes of Andersen, WTAS has risen to become
one of the leading tax firms in the country
individual and corporate tax work, according to George Lyons, managing director of
its New Jersey, New York and Philadelphia
practices. “Private companies have become
more complex,” he said, and there has been
a significant increase in private equity investment in private companies. On top of that,
“SOX has provided a great opportunity for us”
— not least by causing many large accounting
firms to de-emphasize, or even drop, their tax
practices, particularly for individuals.
That the Sarbanes-Oxley Act should be a
boon to the firm is appropriate, as the very
events that gave rise to the law also led to the
formation of W TAS.
at a glance
Firm:
WTAS
Headquarters:
San Francisco
chief executive:
Mark Vorsatz
no. of staff/partners:
550+/90+
no. of offices:
14
2010 revenue:
App. $120 million
Year founded:
2002
Services:
Tax planning and compliance for
businesses and individuals; valuation;
WTAS CEO Mark Vorsatz
Call it a tax trifecta: In just eight years, WTAS has roughly tripled its revenues, its number of part- ners and its client base.
That growth, while certainly gratifying, is
not the main point, according to chief executive officer Mark Vorsatz: “My goal wasn’t to
have a big firm; my goal was to have a great
firm. Our goal should be to be the best in class
— to be the benchmark.”
What it’s serving as a benchmark for is tax
services of all kinds — in both compliance
and planning for individuals and businesses,
and in areas that are relevant to tax, such as
valuation and wealth management.
The tight focus on tax lets the firm concen-
trate on building deep expertise, and also lib-
erates it from the conflicts of interest, both
regulatory and personal, that having other
service lines can bring. “We want to be a tax-
only firm,” said Joe Karczewski, the managing
director of W TAS’s Chicago office. “We all had
experiences where we were constrained in
doing what we wanted to do. ... Without an
audit practice, we avoid a lot of the regula-
tory issues that other firms have.” As a corol-
lary benefit, he added, “We get referrals from
audit firms, because we’re not conflicted out
and we don’t have an audit practice, so we’re
not a threat to them.”
What’s more, regulatory changes and the
growing complexity of business have made
the last decade an ideal time for a firm with
WTAS’s unique combination of expertise in
OUT OF ANDERSEN
In the dark days of 2002, with Arthur Andersen under indictment over its audits of Enron,
Vorsatz, who was a tax partner at the Big Five
firm in charge of the Private Client Services
Group in its San Francisco office, began to
think about a future outside what was soon
to become the Big Four.
He and a group of like-minded Andersen
partners began meeting with potential backers for an independent firm that would, at
least at first, focus largely on tax issues for
high-net-worth clients. They eventually went
with international bank HSBC, which had a
strong global platform, and was ready both to
support them and to give them a great deal of
freedom: The new-born W TAS had operating
autonomy, and its partners had both a majority on its board, and the power to choose their
CEO — Vorsatz.
While the relationship gave W TAS a strong
launch, HSBC’s strategy in the U.S. eventually
changed, and after talks in 2007, the bank and
the tax firm agreed to separate, with HSBC itself providing the funding for a management
buyout by W TAS’s partners.
In the meantime, of course, W TAS hadn’t
been standing still.
“Most of the original group were serving
high-net-worth individuals,” Vorsatz explained. “Two or three years in, we started
actively recruiting corporate and geographic
depth and more service capabilities — federal
business tax, the corporate area, international
