ACCT 570- Fundamentals of Income Taxation

Court Case Presentation

The purpose of the court case research and exercise is to introduce you to tax research tools and help you improve your ability to communicate technical accounting information while you master course materials.  After watching other presentations and preparing your own, you should understand how to

1. Use the basic features of an online tax service and

2. Organize and present tax analyses to an audience of knowledgeable tax professionals.

I will assign each of you to teams of two or three people (depending on enrollment) during the second week of the term. Each team must select a court case that addresses a topic from our discussions. Each team is responsible for downloading the case from the CCH Tax Research Network (on the CWU library web site), then preparing a printed summary using the format discussed in the Elements of Professional Research web page. The summary must in your words, not a cut-and-paste effort; The presentation  must report the Court's decision, including its impact on the decisions of any lower courts and should focus on the case issues related to the topics discussed in class.

Each team must give me a first draft of the written document 1-week before the presentation’s scheduled delivery, then revise that draft per my review.  (Note that I will review it only once and my review is focused on the content and the organization, not the writing style or use of English.) The final version of the written document must be sent to me at least 24-hours before the presentation so that I can distribute it to the class before the presentation. The presentation will be to the class and should take no more than five minutes. (Each team must submit a computer file copy of its PowerPoint file via an e-mail attachment.)

Grading will be based on your ability to communicate the information about the case in the written document and  in the presentation to the class. (I will use the appropriate grading criteria listed on the Professional Communications Grading Criteria web page.) Your tone must be appropriate for an audience of aspiring accounting professionals.

Court Case Teams