Getting To Know You Tuesday: Robert K. Morrow

Robert K. Morrow grew up in a middle-class family in Orange County, California, where he was the third of four children—and, somewhat unexpectedly, the one everyone assumed would go to college. He did, eventually earning two associate’s degrees, a bachelor’s degree, a law degree, and an LL.M. in taxation. For years, he was the only college graduate in his extended family.

Today, Robert is a Certified Specialist in Taxation Law with more than 30 years of legal practice under his belt—and no plans to stop anytime soon. (Note from Kelly: Lawyers generally cannot advertise themselves as specialists unless they meet applicable state bar rules. California offers a formal certification program for legal specialties, including taxation law.)

He still lives in Orange County, just a few miles from his childhood home, with his wife, whom he’s known since junior high school.

So, let’s get to know Robert.

In His Own Words

1. Where are you right now? Sitting at an L-shaped desk in my den. I have no formal office, so this is where I practice law. To my right is a custom-built bookshelf (complete with a rolling ladder) that holds a collection of several hundred books, mostly science fiction (including an anthology in which one of my own stories appears), but there’s also a small section for my law library, too. To my left are more bookshelves holding mostly Lego models I’ve collected over the years, a hobby of mine for as long as I can remember. From where I sit, I can see the winding staircase my wife will come down when she finally emerges in the afternoon from her office upstairs. That’s my cue to run to the bar and open the wine.

2. What’s your official title, and what do you actually do? Official title? Well, I call my law practice “Robert K. Morrow, J.D., LL.M.” and I call myself a tax lawyer. I’m a sole proprietor, so apart from that, there is no “official” title. I represent taxpayers of all shapes and sizes in matters of federal and California taxation, including tax controversies; I advise on the formation, operation, merger and division, and dissolution of business organizations; and I occasionally serve as an expert witness in court or in arbitration on questions involving partnerships and LLCs and other federal or California tax & corporate matters. While it’s been some years now since I stood in a classroom, I was also a part-time (sometimes full-time) law professor for about half of my career.

3. Where did you go to school, and what did you study? I completed my undergraduate studies at the University of California, Irvine, where I received degrees in political science, Russian civilization, and something called “Global Peace and Conflict Studies.” My plan at the time was to go into international arms control as a Russian-speaking lawyer (and I did serve as a translator in the USSR for a couple of weeks in the ‘80s). I went to law school at The American University, Washington College of Law, in Washington, D.C., enrolling in the university’s joint degree program in law and foreign service. During my 2L summer, I landed a clerking position at an international administrative court…and I hated it. The senior people there looked disheveled and miserable, and I couldn’t imagine spending my career becoming one of them. I dropped out of the master’s in foreign service program and just completed the law degree instead (in 1993).

4. How did you end up in tax? In my second and third years of law school, I took a couple of tax classes. I was, let’s say, an average student during law school, but I excelled in tax. There was just something easy about it for me. Intuitive. I had never imagined a career in tax law until I abandoned the foreign service angle. After that, it seemed the obvious route to go.

5. What was your first real job? In college, I worked for a small CPA firm, mostly because I liked the accountant who owned it (and I was dating his daughter). I had no real intention at the time of getting into tax or accounting. After law school (having since abandoned foreign service), I moved back to Southern California and got a job at another CPA firm. The owner of this firm was (is…I still know him) a JD/CPA who wanted to grow the legal side of his business. I was the first lawyer he hired. I think today he has twenty.

6. What’s one thing people might be surprised to learn about you? I’m an unapologetic, lifelong geek. As I mentioned, I have a library of several hundred science fiction books and have even sold two of my own stories. That qualified me as a “professional member” of San Diego Comic-Con, which I attended every summer for about a decade. (It eventually became too crowded and I stopped going.) I know every episode of Star Trek (in all its iterations) and all of The Twilight Zone, too; I have seen every Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movie more than once; and I could probably recite, from beginning to end, every Monty Python movie (and a good number of the episodes of its television series, too).

7. If you weren’t working in tax, what would you be doing? If my fiction writing sold better, I’d probably be doing that. I just haven’t worked too hard at it in some time. That said, I recently revisited a 170,000-word novel I wrote set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe. (I mentioned I was a geek, didn’t I?) If I could sell that book, I could see myself retiring from law and immediately starting the sequel.

8. What’s the best piece of tax, money, or career advice you’ve ever received? When I got that first job out of law school (with the JD/CPA), my boss told me, on day one, to go get an LL.M. in tax. He even offered to pay for it. That changed everything. I graduated at the top of my class, and when the next semester started, I was an instructor in the same program (and eventually its dean). That led to fifteen years of teaching tax law, including one year as an associate dean and two more as a full-time visiting professor. The degree also satisfied one of the criteria (besides experience and an examination) to become a State Bar Certified Specialist in Taxation Law, an achievement I’ve always been proud of.

9. What tax issue do you think is getting too much attention right now? Oh gosh, don’t get me started. Short-term rentals and the Augusta Rule, bonus depreciation and cost segregation studies, 1031s and DSTs… LinkedIn (and, as I understand it, Instagram and YouTube) is just lousy with “tax influencers” pushing these plans. There are sound principles behind all of them, but the constant stream of “You need a Wyoming LLC to buy your next truck!” just drives me crazy.

10. What tax issue isn’t getting enough attention? The burgeoning Circuit split on the Section 1402(a)(13) question of when limited partners may exclude their distributive shares from being included in their earnings from self-employment for purposes of the SE tax. I was surprised by the Fifth Circuit’s initial conclusion (in the Sirius Solutions case) that any member of a limited partnership who had limited liability under state law was automatically excluded from the SE tax, though the court recently walked that back. For my part, the decades-long rule of the limited partner’s level of participation determining the 1402 question was good enough, not to mention sensible. I could not and cannot understand how it could be any other way.

11. What’s the biggest tax myth you’d like to bust? Most people (including many practitioners) believe that a tax return cannot be audited three years after it was filed (or six for large underpayments, and no limit for fraud). That’s not technically correct. The three-year statute applies to the assessment of an underpayment, which is to say that if the IRS were to audit a four-year-old tax return and found an underpayment, they’d be barred from making an assessment. That doesn’t mean that they can’t examine that return, though. They can. I once was involved in a matter where the IRS went back almost thirty years checking the depreciation deductions on a commercial property. They found the deductions had been calculated incorrectly and therefore recomputed the adjusted basis of the property, increasing its gain on the sale in the year under examination. That gain had been recognized in a non-time-barred year, so the assessment of additional tax was perfectly lawful.

12. What’s a tax question you wish people would ask you more often? “Should I be an LLC or an S corporation? Or do I need either one?” Most of the time, when a new client comes to me for entity formation, they’ve already made up their mind about what they want. Every single time I have to get into what their business is, how much money they make (or expect to make), if they have (or anticipate) employees or partners, and so on. I wish the question they’d come to me with was, “Here’s what I do (or intend to do). What kind of entity, if any, would you recommend?”

13. What’s one tax rule you would change if you could? A few years ago, the IRS made a change that requires K-1s (on partnership 1065s) to report something called “tax capital” instead of the traditional book capital. I get it: reporting tax capital, when combined with the partner’s share of liabilities, allows the IRS to compute (or at least approximate) the partner’s adjusted basis in their partnership interest (their “outside basis”). But now book capital—which is critical, in my view, to maintaining a good set of books for any partnership—is left by the wayside. What I’d rather see is that we go back to reporting book capital on K-1s but add a requirement that the partner’s outside basis also be computed and reported (either by the partnership or by the partners themselves). I think that would be the far better approach. (Oh, and Section 199A. I really hate Section 199A.)

14. What’s one non-tech thing in your office that you couldn’t do without? My eyeglasses. I’m kidding (though it’s true). I suppose that’d be sticky notes. Whenever my phone rings, I have the large-sized yellow notes ready to go for quick note-taking. Eventually those notes will often get re-typed into a document or what-have-you, but I think it’s a bit rude to type the whole time during a phone call. One big, beautiful sticky note is my solution.

15. Which tech tool, platform, or software do you rely on most in your practice? Microsoft Excel. Far and away, Excel. A day doesn’t go by when there aren’t two or three worksheets open on my laptop. I’ve gotten pretty good with it, too. (After thirty years of using it, that’s no surprise, I suppose.) One time I got a call from a law school dean saying that my students had loudly sung my praises for the worksheets that I had shared with the class during the semester. She asked if I’d be willing to teach a course on Excel someday. I thought that was a strange course to offer at a law school, but I said I would, sure. (Nothing ever came of it.)

16. What’s the best use of AI in tax or tax practice? Proofreading and Shepardizing. I work alone (mostly) and have no assistants. I’ll have AI proofread a contract or memo for me just to catch errors, whether grammatical or otherwise. I’ll usually also ask it to Shepardize (i.e., confirm the accuracy of) all the legal authorities I cite. I’ve tried it on some complicated Excel worksheets, too, but it hasn’t been all that insightful on those, at least not yet.

17. What are you watching right now (streaming or otherwise)? Furiosa on Hulu. And Archer. I think my wife and I are on our third run-through of Archer. For the last couple of weeks, though, we’ve abandoned TV for the most part in favor of a book series someone turned us on to: Dungeon Crawler Carl. It’s a hilarious (and sometimes dark) interpretation of every fantasy role-playing computer game ever made. We love it. (That’s the geek thing again, of course.)

18. Coffee or tea? Coffee. I like tea, though. I’ll sometimes melt ginger into it to fight indigestion.

19. Pancakes or waffles? Either one, but probably 51% waffles. My wife and I sometimes host what we call “Brunch Club,” where we have friends and family over and set out everything they’ll need to make their own brunch items. Often someone will come with their own homemade batter or syrup. Never hosted one yet that wasn’t the best of times. (Come to think of it, it’s been a while since we’ve done that. I’ll have to mention that to her this evening.)

20. If you received an unexpected tax refund tomorrow, what would you do with it? If I could confirm it was erroneous, I’d shred the check. I’ve seen too many clients excitedly deposit an erroneous refund only to be charged exorbitant interest once the IRS figured it out. If, on the other hand, it was correct due to some error on my part (perish the thought!) I’d find something (or some things) on this little list I keep of gifts I want to buy my wife and, well, I’d buy it (or them). She wants a set of copper pots & pans, for example. Have you ever priced those? It’s outrageous what they want for a nice, full set. Cheaper to get the downstairs floors re-tiled (which is also on the list).

You can find out more about Robert on LinkedIn.

About Getting to Know You

If you’d like to recommend a tax pro to be featured, send your suggestions to gtky (at) taxgirl (dot) com with the subject: Getting to Know You Tuesday. Self-nominations are totally okay and encouraged! If you’ve submitted a nomination before, feel free to send it again. I’ll consider all submissions, even those that were selected, so long as they were more than three years ago.