Fractional State and Local Tax Director
Senior state and local tax capability, retained monthly.
G&G State Tax Group was built to work on the fractional model: a senior state and local tax practitioner on call to the in-house tax team and the finance function, the way a fractional CFO serves a company, retained monthly and kept current on the company. Accounting, law, and wealth management firms engage the same capability as a state and local tax bench under their own engagements.
A company with a multistate footprint reaches the point of needing a state and local tax function before it can justify hiring one. The work exists (the notices, the registrations, the apportionment questions, the state provision, the diligence request that arrives during a transaction), but it does not fill a role, and so it is distributed among people whose first responsibility is something else.
The work rarely arrives as one question. It arrives on three levels at once: the operations, where sales and use tax, property tax, and local licensing live; the entities, where franchise, margin, and gross receipts taxes attach to the structure itself; and the owners, where pass-through entity tax elections, composite returns, and nonresident withholding decide what each state takes from each owner's share. A fractional director holds all three levels in one head, which is the point of the arrangement.
The retained arrangement provides the capability without the headcount. Standing availability within the retainer for the questions that arise. Notices triaged within one business day of arrival. Review of state positions before they are filed rather than after. Registration and calendar upkeep maintained rather than reconstructed. Coordination with the company's federal, international, and audit advisors, so the state and local seat at the table is filled. And continuity: the history of the company's state footprint stays with the engagement, so nobody has to be re-briefed each time.
The arrangement fits companies at two stages. The company whose multistate work has outgrown ad hoc treatment but not yet justified a dedicated hire. And the company with an in-house tax team whose federal workload leaves neither time nor depth for the state and local layer; there the fractional director works with the team, not in place of it.
Engagements are scoped in advance with a fixed monthly fee. Work outside the scope is quoted before it begins, not billed after it. The arrangement typically opens with a nexus study or a defined first project, then converts to the standing retainer.