Health Care Tax Professionals Can Make Own Career Opportunities

HEALTH CARE TAX PROFESSIONALS
CAN MAKE OWN CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

Healthcare tax professionals are being hit from all sides. There are new challenges from the FTC, HCFA and the IRS. States and municipalities have threatened revocation of exemption to sales and real estate taxes. Everyone, it seems, wants to make the tax manager's life more difficult.

The hospital CFO is compassionless. He is responsible and feeling the pressure. This pressure gets pushed down to the tax manager.

Administrators have their plans and agendas to follow. Corporate decisions have been made. More are urgently pending. Tax complications can slow things down. This frustrates bosses.

The tax manager has been labeled a bottleneck.

If the healthcare tax manager still views his role as compliance - just filling out tax returns, its no wonder he's feeling doomed. As a sole function that position is doomed. But the person filling that position isn't doomed. Not if he wakes up and fights back. He can turn these career- threatening challenges into career-making opportunities.

First, he must recognize that this crisis for the tax manager is also a crisis for the organization. Secondly, no one in the organization is better positioned to make a more significant contribution to the organization's well-being.

Today the valued tax professional is a strategic business advisor. To become a business advisor the tax pro must think of himself as one. For some this may require a fundamental change in self- image.

This self image is the foundation for developing new skills for the new environment. Accountants like to be exact; advisors give estimates. Compliance work is duty-oriented; risk articulation is accomplishment-oriented. Accountants work with numbers; advisors work with people.

A strategic business advisor is unmistakenly in the people side of the business. There are tax issues now in every business decision. Get to know the people who are involved in all the aspects of your organizations business.

Become a collaborator with the deal-makers and marketeers. Educate them on the tax environment. They want to know the risks. If you are making the best of a bad decision now, politely suggest to them that next time it will be cheaper to plan things correctly than to fix them later. Make yourself easy to work with. Make it an obvious and pleasant advantage to be included.

Get to know the medical directors as your organization goes about acquiring physician practices. Caution them about promising too much. Explain how the IRS determines business valuations. Tell them that for charitable hospitals physicians are now considered insiders - prohibited from private inurement and benefit. Paying too much for a practice could bring an IRS challenge to the parent company's tax exempt status.

Get to know administrators, directors, and vice presidents of the clinics, group practices,
foundations, trusts and other subsidiaries. Let them get to know you. Offer to work with them as they face issues and questions of unrelated business income. Let them know the consequences of the decisions. Become a risk-articulator.

Get to know the reimbursement people. Educate yourself on the reimbursement issues in Stark I and Stark II. HCFA has penalties for fraud and abuse.

Get to know as much as you can about local taxing authorities. State and local real estate and sales tax exempfions are being threatened in Texas, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Colorado and Pennsylvania. With so little law decided history is being made now. As a business advisor you may find yourself with sketchy information in a high stakes negotiating session. The organization's deal-makers will want advice. Be prepared to successfully advise them.

Every hospital and every hospital system will soon face some or all of these challenges. With the necessary tax knowledge and people skills the healthcare tax manager should welcome the challenges he once feared. They can transform a career from compliance duties to a business advisor's accomplishments.

It's empowering. If your current hospital doesn't appreciate you, the one across town will.
They'll be facing the same challenges. They'll need someone to successfully advise their deal- makers. These new skills mean job security and career enhancement.

Entrust your confidential search to us.

Vickers Chambless Managed Search
400 Perimeter Center Terrace, NE
Suite 900
Atlanta, Georgia 30346
Phone: (404) 365-0030
Fax: (404) 231-1351