What Is On This Site
This site hosts over a decade’s worth of writing, mostly about tax topics by Peter J Reilly (that would be me) and a few guest contributors here and there. It consists of content originally published on Forbes.com and my alternate blogs Passive Activities And Other Oxymorons, Your Tax Matters Partner,We Are The Future Generations and some content exclusive to this site.
Most of the content is about taxes, usually current developments. There is also quite a bit about history and some things that I don’t know how to classify.
How It Gets Here
The actual criterion for the tax posts is “stuff I find interesting”. I read or at least look at every Tax Court decision and decisions of other federal courts concerning taxes, I scan private letter rulings and other FOIA documents and scan articles about tax on SSRN (Social Science Research Network). That’s not all, although it does produce more material than I could ever deal with.
Looking back on what I do select it breaks down to items of practical interest, funny engaging stories and what I call matter for reflection. The matter for reflection is about the way that tax law interacts with other areas such as religion and broader constitutional and historical issues. Sometimes a seemingly isolated development will become a long story arc.
About Me
I was born in 1952 and grew up in Fairview NJ, where I attended parochial grammar school (St. John the Baptist). I attended Xavier High School in Manhattan.
I’m the one with the bad haircut under 68 with the tall boys in the back
Xavier was a unique place. It was Jesuit and had mandatory Army JROTC which meant we commuted to school on bus and subway in military uniforms. The school is on West 16th street just a bit north of Greenwich Village 1966-1970. The Jesuits and the Army were a perfect team for forming young Catholic gentlemen before 1967, but the Vietnam War and the counter culture in general kind of wreaked havoc with all that. The most famous New York Province Jesuit (whose funeral not that long ago was held at Xavier) was Daniel Berrigan. While we were having Military Science blocks of instructions in platoon tactics and counterinsurgency, Father Berrigan was on the run from the FBI. Along with other factors, the education there developed a somewhat skeptical person who has issues with authority and suspicion of orthodoxy, but also a great respect for venerable institutions that get batted around by history.
I developed a strong love of literature at Xavier which motivated me to major in English at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester Mass. That didn’t go so well. There is something about literature that I just don’t get – at least not enough to be an English major. I switched to history and being good at math, I became fascinated with something called Cliometrics. After a year as a VISTA in Worcester, I went to the University of Chicago to study history. That didn’t go well either.
I ended up back in Worcester where I worked as a hotel night auditor and took accounting courses at night (before going to work) which got me a bachelors in business administration with a concentration in accounting from Clark University.
I worked for a year as a controller for a travel company and then found my true calling joining the staff of Joseph B Cohan and Associates in November 1979. I took the CPA exam in 1980 and worked on a variety of businesses and individuals at JBC. I ended up focusing somewhat on affordable housing partnerships, but at JBC specialization was for insects. What really made my career was the Tax Reform Act of 1986, because I read more than everybody else and everything that everybody else knew from experience was all of a sudden wrong.
I was the last person to become a partner in JBC and was one of the founding partners of CCR, a large regional firm that ran from 1997 to 2011, when we sold to Grant Thornton. I was a managing director with Grant Thornton. I loved Grant Thornton, but as Montgomery Clift said to Donna Reed (referring to the Army) “Just because a man loves a thing, doesn’t mean it has to love him back”. I worked a boutique firm for a few years after that. My business partner, who is also my life partner, and I withdrew from the practice in November 2018. Evie and I travelled the country in an RV until the plague interrupted things. We had one more major trip in 2021 and then turned in the RV.
I had been somewhat preoccupied with the bicentennial of Lafayette’s visit to the United States, but that is over now.
I started blogging in December 2009 and now have a pretty respectable amount of material – over 2,000 posts. I am available for consulting work.
Between July 2011 and November 2025 most of the material here first appeared on Forbes.com. It is still there but I am no longer posting on Forbes.com.
You can also find some exclusive material by me on Think Outside The Tax Box.
And now there is my book, published by TOTTB – Reilly’s Laws of Tax Planning (&Life!).
