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Gary Kaufman is a tax attorney with more than twenty-five years of experience in domestic and international strategic tax planning. A focus of his notable expertise includes minimizing the global tax cost of doing business overseas and domestically and converting the tax function of multinational companies from a passive compliance role into a proactive profit center. Currently in private practice, Gary is well known in the international tax community and is the founder of a global tax practice.
As Senior Tax Counsel to several multinational corporations headquartered in the U.S., he has earned a reputation for consistently achieving substantial cash flow and profit and loss savings by designing and implementing innovative tax planning strategies. A recent project was the development of a tax-efficient structure for a major global manufacturing corporation with operations in 89 countries.
In this example, serving as Senior Tax Counsel at a leading global manufacturer of automotive and industrial products and services, he initiated and executed a comprehensive debt-restructuring plan for European, Canadian and Asian operations by leveraging up the foreign subsidiaries and maximizing the beneficial use of losses to create substantial annual tax savings. In another example, he designed and implemented strategies enabling the parent company to repatriate millions in overseas earnings free of U.S. tax and foreign withholding tax through loans, formation of Netherlands finance entities and creation of a favorable interplay between the investment in U.S. property rules and net operating loss rules. During his tenure, he also served as Chairman of management, Finance Initiative Review Committee.
Gary was Senior Tax Counsel and Director, Tax Counsel, respectively, for two of the world’s most widely recognized media and entertainment corporations. His collaborative relationships with senior business and finance executives as well as his extensive global network of tax practitioners allowed him to create efficiencies and cost savings with respect to corporate acquisitions and in the development of a tax structure for coverage of three Winter Olympic Games. Furthermore, Gary improved U.S. foreign tax credit efficiency by millions each year by partnering with management to increase low-taxed foreign source income to absorb excess foreign tax credits. He structured overseas start-up operations maximizing opportunities for deferral of U.S. tax on foreign earnings. He also secured favorable tax rulings from local Ministries of Finance avoiding permanent establishment taxation status in connection with the three Winter Olympic Games, saving millions of dollars in local income tax. In another achievement, he restructured the licensing and inter-company pricing for Brazilian operations maximizing cash repatriation and achieving millions in annual tax savings.
Gary earned a Juris Doctor degree from Brooklyn Law School and a Master of Laws in Taxation from New York University School of Law. He is a member of the Foreign Activities of U.S. Taxpayers Committee of the New York State Bar Association. An accomplished industry spokesperson, he has lectured at the American Corporate Counsel Association, Foreign Trade Commissioners Association of New York, New York City Economic Development Corporation, Hudson Valley Bank (Continuing Legal Education Seminar), Institute for International Film Financing, New York State Bar Association: International Law and Practice Section, New York State Society of CPA’s, New York Women in Television and Film and the Association of Bar of the City of New York: Entertainment Law Committee. Selected topics include: “Introduction to United States Tax Planning for Doing Business in the United States- Opportunities and Pitfalls”; “Introduction to United States Tax Planning for Doing Business Overseas-Opportunities and Pitfalls”; “International Co-Productions and Film Financing Tax Incentives- Tax Planning Opportunities”; “Structuring Foreign Hybrid Entities under IRS Regulations”; and “Partnering with Business Colleagues- Reengineering the Corporate Tax Department.”
