A silver medal winner on the national CPA exam, Pat is also a prolific author on tax issues and focuses his practice in two main areas: tax accounting, and challenges to the validity of tax regulations and other types of actions issued by the IRS and the Treasury.

Pat has a nationally-recognized practice in tax accounting. He has published numerous articles, primarily in Tax Notes, dealing with various issues relating to challenges to the validity of tax regulations issued by the IRS and the Treasury. These articles are listed in the “Publications” section below. In 2011 and 2012, after the Supreme Court’s 2011 Mayo decision, he published several groundbreaking articles in Tax Notes demonstrating how the Mayo decision provided strong support for using the Administrative Procedure Act’s arbitrary and capricious standard as a basis for challenging the validity of tax regulations. Along these same lines, Pat, together with two other IPB partners, Les Schneider and Eric Fox, represented the taxpayer in Dominion Resources, Inc. v. United States, 681 F.3d 1313 (Fed. Cir. 2012), in which the Federal Circuit upheld the taxpayer’s challenge to the validity of a provision in the interest capitalization regulations under section 263A. This is a landmark court decision, because this decision was the very first time that any court applied the Administrative Procedure Act’s arbitrary and capricious standard to invalidate a tax regulation. Many challenges to the validity of tax regulations involve issues of statutory interpretation, another area in which Pat specializes.

More recently, Pat has published several articles in Tax Notes arguing that the Supreme Court’s 2015 Direct Marketing decision provides strong support for applying a much narrower interpretation of the Anti-Injunction Act than has traditionally been applied, an interpretation which would permit taxpayers to challenge the validity of tax regulations in federal district court without first having the regulation applied to the taxpayer making the challenge, a significant departure from the traditional view that the validity of tax regulations may be challenged only in Tax Court deficiency actions or in tax refund litigation.

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