Clarity is the best policy, Webb reminds Tax Court Symposium audience

No one wants to go to Tax Court, so what steps can valuation experts take to keep their clients out of it? Dennis Webb, a principal of Primus Valuations, listed three basic principles at the ASA’s May 17 U.S. Tax Court Cases Symposium in Cerritos, Calif.:

1. Find the facts.
2. Connect the facts. “There is market data; there is indication of discounts; there are various ways of looking at the hodgepodge of data,” Webb said.
3. Tell the story in a way that a reader can understand it. Webb said he is working on an admittedly complicated case now and it took him two days to read three reports from a Texas appraiser to figure out what he’d done. “It shouldn’t take me two days and it shouldn’t take the client two days to read. Write something people can understand.”