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Manage your own schedule and don’t rely on the resource management team. If you get busy on consulting, it’s hard to pull you off for compliance.
Find the people who focus on consulting in your group and continually try to get work from them (weekly check-ins, every time you see them in the office, etc). Don’t turn down the smallest request. Once you get the opportunity, make them want to work with you again.
I hope that someone in this group who is still in international tax, can provide you some better advice than me, but I wanted to share my experience and thoughts. It is somewhat difficult, or at least more difficult than it used to be, to do primarily consulting in international tax. Between the TCJA and pillar two the need for quantitative work has increased greatly, which naturally increases the amount of time spent on compliance matters. I ultimately transitioned out of international tax because it seemed unlikely that I would be able to maintain enough time doing consulting projects. When I left I was responsible for $1 million of compliance projects and that was just not something I wanted to do long-term.
That being said, my experience is probably not everyone’s and it might be possible to have a consulting heavy international tax practice. The first thing you need to figure out is what kind of consulting projects is your group doing and are they doing a lot of them. Transactional work like deals tend to be heavier on the consulting. There’s also internal restructuring and value chain or supply chain management. That used to be a significant opportunity for consulting work and it may still be.
One thing you need to ask yourself is are you capable of, and interested in, being a numbers person. It is much harder to do consulting work at public accounting firms if not. And by that I mean someone who is willing to roll up their sleeves spend a lot of time in Excel models and spend a lot of time working with client data. That being said some groups are more or less modeling heavy and yours might not have that much work.
You might also consider whether your group is the best group to be in. There might be a different group at your firm, such as a national group, that you could either join or do a rotation with. You might also consider if a national tax office position would be available or what opportunities you might take in order to ultimately end up there. Perhaps there is a group at a different firm that you could join if if needed.
To the extent there is consulting work happening in your group. The best way to get involved is to 1) have a stellar reputation as a hard worker, 2) be a sponge and try to absorb everything technical you can while doing the compliance work and perhaps even doing some outside reading, and 3) raising your hand and asking if they were our opportunities to do those types of projects or anything that can help you get more exposure to that kind of work.
Lastly, you might consider whether you want to leave international tax, which is what I did. Mergers and acquisitions tax can have more consulting work. Although 382, basis, and e&p studies all have a compliance like vibe and might not seem like an improvement.
I’m in international and this is a fair summary. Although I would say that my practice is almost exclusively consulting work you describe. Yes, we need to model, but the only compliance is for my clients where we do significant consulting work.
It’s definitely not as easy as it was, but show you are good at it and opportunities find you.
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Yeah that’s going to be a tough lift if OPs experience is limited to international compliance engagements. Even in the strongest markets that wouldn’t work.