About the firm

At regional and local accounting firms, including independent firms affiliated with national networks, the client obligations are the same as at a national firm, but the state and local tax function is frequently one person. That person is also carrying the federal return, the provision, the notices that continue to arrive, and a filing deadline in a week. The questions that reach a specialist from that seat are rarely the most technical ones; they are tactical and urgent, and they compound quickly when nobody has the time to look at them. The same is true inside multistate companies, where state and local tax is one line on one person's job description. State and local tax is the work a department of one most easily defers, which is why it tends to surface as a crisis rather than a task. Sales tax is the sharpest case: it is a trust tax, collected from customers and held for the state.

G&G does that state and local tax work directly, both the tactical and the technical, for companies with a multistate footprint and for the firms that serve them. The firm works as an extension of the client's existing tax function, engaged on retainer or by project, led at senior level from scoping to the final deliverable.

Edvin Givargis has practiced state and local tax since 2006. He has advanced through manager, senior manager, principal, and partner at national and regional firms, where he assisted the internal technical functions other practitioners turn to when a question resists resolution. That work builds a particular skill: knowing how to take a position when the authority is genuinely thin, and how to document it so it can be defended. He has taught multistate taxation at the graduate level as an adjunct professor and presents on state and local tax to professional and academic audiences nationwide.

Controversy work has been a constant of his practice, through audit, protest, appeal, settlement, and refund claim before the California Franchise Tax Board, the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration, the Office of Tax Appeals, and the equivalent authorities and appeal forums in other states where their rules permit. California residency is a recurring subject of the practice, and one he has taught and presented on at length.