Law360 Quotes Patricia Lewis on IRS Revamp of APA Program

The Internal Revenue Service has again restructured its advance pricing agreement [APA] function for multinational companies, the agency said in a statement Tuesday, but an IRS official confirmed the reorganization isn’t on the same large scale as a revamp executed in 2011.

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Patricia Lewis of Caplin & Drysdale in Washington, D.C., said the plan to embed economists in the teams is important.

“Under the old arrangement, you’d find someone from the economist group to work with you, but they had a lot of projects going on,” she said. “Now I think they’ll be more engaged with their teams because they’ll see everything the team is working on.”

Lewis saw the management changes as a move to improve efficiency.

“One of the complaints you hear is the time things take,” she said. “You need to have strong managers making sure people are staying on schedule. I think that’s been a weak link in the past.”

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Excerpt taken from the article “IRS Revamps APA Program, But Not As Drastically As In 2011” by Molly Moses for Law360.