In this episode of the SALTovation Podcast, Aprio’s Meredith Smith and Stacey Roberts sit down with Andrea Muse, Editor-in-Chief of Tax Notes State, to explore her journey from aspiring doctor to tax policy expert and journalist. Andrea shares insights from her time at the Virginia Department of Taxation, where she focused on legislative policy and guidance, and reflects on how those experiences shaped her understanding of complex state tax issues.

The speakers also dive into the mission of Tax Analysts, publisher of Tax Notes State, and why staying informed on developments like Colorado’s Netflix case and the evolving landscape of digital taxes is more important than ever for tax professionals.

#SALTovation #TaxNotesState #StateTax #TaxPolicy #TaxAnalysts #DigitalTax #ColoradoTax #TaxTrends #TaxPodcast #MeredithAndStacey #AccountforAnything #Aprio

Key Takeaways:

• Andrea Muse’s career journey from aspiring doctor to Editor-in-Chief of Tax Notes State.
• How the Virginia Department of Taxation is crafting legislative policy and taxpayer guidance.
• How Tax Notes State promotes transparency, timely reporting, and deeper insight into state and local tax issues.
• Key Trends Practitioners Should Watch as Colorado’s Netflix case evolves.

State and local taxes—simplified. As your single-source provider for SALT solutions, Aprio can help streamline all your state and local tax compliance needs:

Contact Us: https://www.aprio.com/business-tax/state-local-tax-salt-consulting/

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed on the SALTovation podcast, including that of all participants, are the speaker’s own and do not represent the views, thoughts, and opinions of Aprio or any of its affiliates. The material and information presented on the podcast is for general information purposes only. The “Aprio” name and all forms and abbreviations are the property of its owner and its use does not imply endorsement of or opposition to any specific product or service.

Mentioned in this episode:

Schedule a Call with the Aprio Team Now!

Introductory Call

Welcome to Saltovation.

The Saltovation show is a podcast series featuring the leading voices in SALT where we talk about the issues and strategies to help you make sense of state and local tax.

In part one of our conversation with Andrea Muse, Editor in Chief of Tax Note State, we explore her path from the Virginia Department of Taxation to leading one of the most respected publications in the SALT world.

Andrea brings a rare blend of government policy and journalism experience, and she shares how that background informs the way she thinks about transparency, guidance, tax policy, and the evolving issues across the states.

Welcome to the Saltovation Podcast where we dive into the world of state and local tax with the people who shape it. Today, we're thrilled to be joined by Andrea Muse, the editor in chief of Tax Notes State.

Andrea brings a unique perspective to salt, having worked in both government and journalism.

From her time at the Virginia Department of Taxation to leading one of the most respected publications in the field, Andrea has seen the evolution of state tax policy from multiple angles. We're excited to learn more. Welcome, Andrea.

Well, thank you. And thank you for having me.

So, as we dive in, could you tell us a bit about your background and the path you took into the state and local tax world?

Sure. I actually knew I was going to be a doctor when I grew up. I actually had a paramedics certification in high school. I worked in sports medicine.

I was athletic training and then I went to college, the College of Mary Mary. And I took biology and I took economics and I hated biology and I really liked economics. So.

There was a point where I was going, could I double major? The answer was no. And I just went straight from economics and then from there to law school.

I took a lot of the corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions classes. There was one tax class, I loved it, but there was just the one.

And then I the Virginia Department of Taxation was hiring, so I went from there directly out of law school. So I've been in state and local taxation all my adult life.

My son had a similar he's still in college, but he had a similar revelation when he was still in high school because he thought about going into the medical field and studying some kind of medical field in college. And he took anatomy and that sealed the deal for him. And so guess what major he is now? Finance. So similar.

Yes.

The only reason I even took economics in freshman year was because my dad insisted. He was like, you have to take. It's a class. It's a practical class. Everybody needs it. It's horrible.

You will hate it, but you will learn so much and I loved it. So I was like, okay, well, I guess this lets me know where I should be head in life.

Well, and so you hold a certification in state and local tax. What is that certification? Can you tell us just a little bit more about what that is?

Sure. So while I was working for Virginia, I actually went back and got my LLM in taxation, so kind of master's in law.

And Georgetown has a program where with the LLM, you can specialize in state and local taxation at the time, or I believe international taxation is another one. Since I was at that time, I worked enough to know that this was probably where I was going to stay.

So I went and specialized and focused on the state and local tax courses.

Yeah, that's cool. Because not a lot of universities have that option. I mean, I think.

I mean, I know I'm speaking for myself, but when I first got out of school 100 years ago, or even in school, I just had like a, you know, like a federal income tax class. Right. Plus then all my accounting classes and I did an internship as an internal auditor for a company and realized, nope, don't like that.

Prefer tax. But I didn't. I was not exposed to state and local tax until I was in the, you know, at Anderson, the first. The first generation of Anderson.

So it was. I kind of feel like some of us that fall into it, we fall into it as opposed to getting some kind of certification.

So it's good to know that, you know, there are schools out there that, you know, have those programs.

It was great, especially for me, I think, as you said, I. There's the one federal income tax class I had in law school, and that was the only thing that we had when I went back for my LLM.

I had worked in the state for four or five years by then.

Sure.

So I knew where I wanted to specialize. But it was also really helpful.

One thing about working in the state is at least for where I was very much concentrating on specific taxes, sales tax, communications taxes at the time. And so going back and being able to specialize in income tax was really helpful. So I really appreciated the program.

Well, that's awesome. So while you were at the Virginia Department of Taxation and Apologies.

Virginia, if I call it the dor, this is force of habit, and I'm sure they get that all the time. How kind of, what was your role there?

What'd you do and kind of how do you think that kind of shaped what you became and kind of gave you an understanding of state tax policy?

Yeah. So one really nice thing about the division I was working in is policy development.

So basically my job was to staff the General Assembly's finance committees with when they had committee meetings, if they had questions, if they were looking at proposed legislation. And through that was also fiscal impact statements, the revenue impact, also administrative cost impact.

So the Policy development division actually is like half economists and half lawyers, which is one reasons why it was a perfect fit with my undergrad degree of economics. That was very interesting, learning the economy side of economic side of legislation.

But also we were in charge of guidance documents and ruling letters to write for which doing guidance documents and kind of policy.

You, when you're in the room, it is amazing looking back now, when you hear something or you see a tax law, you see a policy and it's kind of intuitive, or you're going, what? Why did they do whatever? Why can't they just. And being in the room, you realize that a lot of times they actually did think about that.

It actually did come up. Somebody raised that issue about can you just make it easier if. And there was a legitimate reason why no, you can't. Not always.

Obviously things get missed.

But I really liked that side of it, listening to everybody, the legislators who were trying to both raise revenue or maybe give back to industry that needs a tax break or exemption industry, who's looking to see what's going on, on what taxes do they need to pay? Both. Not just we don't want to pay this tax, but also, can you pay this tax? How burdensome is it what kind of implementation problems you may have?

And so working in the policy development, it was very fun to get all of those perspectives and I really appreciated that. And I think now a lot of times I do step back and you see something and go, wait a minute, maybe I'm missing something.

Is there a reason why they can't do this? Is there a business that objected and said, honestly, there's just no way, or is it the state that said, actually our systems just can't handle this?

I think working for the state, I feel like I give grace to everybody a little bit more now from being on that side.

How did you have your segue?

So as much as I liked working for the state, and I really did, I didn't think I was going to be there forever. And there just came a point where I wanted to move on. I wanted to change.

I wanted to get closer to D.C. and move to Northern Virginia from central Richmond. And also I wanted to write. I liked writing and I wanted to a little bit Faster deadlines. The government is a lot of things. It is not always fast.

It can be sometimes, but it's not a lot of times fast. And I was looking and writing and deadlines journalism just kind of pops in there perfectly.

It's also I think nice to be able to talk to people, all different perspectives about taxes. Not even really have a. To have a result in mind, but just to have the debate and just to talk.

That can be kind of hard sometimes when you're on kind of the inside the government. There's a lot of things you just can't talk about that is going on. And I like taxes. Okay, fun.

I mean no judgment here. We've been doing this a while, right. And most of the people who listen to us are, you know, kind of tax people. So no judgment, no shame.

And in enjoying taxes, right. Especially we're in an interesting time. We've had interesting times of well, what's happening. When times are good, companies can be compliant.

When times are bad, governments need to look to alternative sourcing for revenue raises. And that can come in forms of like audit changes in legislation.

You know, Colorado just had a special session and you know, did away with a business friendly thing, you know, in the vendor fee on our sales tax return. So yeah, there is always something to be interested in.

Right.

In the tax field.

Exactly. And I will say to not slight working for the state.

One thing about doing the guidance documents is that you really learn a lot about some specialized industries and how they work. I got to tour coal mine once because of an issue, looking for a tax issue. And I was. It's amazing people, you know, you, you one.

I always thought that learning about the, the any industry makes what you're writing for guidance better. If you understand what's going on, you can let everybody, you know, people, people are helped by that by right.

Versus looking at a guidance document and going but that's not how my business works. It can. So I really. But it's also different when you're in the government.

It can be kind of limiting as far as what you can say, how you can say and who you can talk with.

Well, and so let's talk about tax analysts for a minute. For those who are unfamiliar with what is tax analysts and what's its mission, why does it exist?

And do you have a little bit of a history lesson that you can give us kind of on the publication?

Absolutely.

We have three magazines, one geared towards federal taxes, one towards international taxes, and one which I'm the editor in chief of for the state and local taxation. So the mission has always really been for tax analysts to kind of, you know, help open debate on taxes and also transparency.

1972 tax analysts actually sued the IRS to get private letter rulings and technical advice.

Memoranda tams public so, you know, we've always been kind of focused on open tax systems and through that that's what I think is a pretty good synergy with news giving coverage of what's going on in the world of taxes.

We've continued that we've use FOIA in different ways and there's also been more litigation as far as with states to see about ruling letters to have them made public or in certain forms. And I think that that's been a really huge goal for us.

State is its own kind of specialized field in tax and it's both sometimes smaller community than federal tax, but also for people who don't work in state taxes. I think you don't realize just how broad the topics can be, how many jurisdictions you're dealing with. And they're not all doing taxes the same way.

They're not all. It's not very uniform. And so while it's a specialized field, I do think we have just such a breadth of of issues and topics.

And so I think it was, you know, a great idea to kind of split. Split it off into its own magazine.

Like in the 90s that were pretty common and as probably we've all we can all attest to.

Right.

Because we've been in this field for a while. You know, it's morphed and changed and evolved and some of those structures are still obviously valid and everything.

But we've seen quite a lot of changes in, you know, the 30 plus years that the publication's been out.

Yes.

One, what kind of what gap does the tax note state fill kind of in that state tax landscape? Right. We know that kind of when you think about taxes, there are three buckets from like a topical perspective. Right.

Like you said, federal, international and state. And so focusing on that state component, where does tax notes fit?

Kind of maybe what was missing in the market and still kind of continue that separate component of its mission to kind of meet the need of the people?

I think a lot of state taxation, especially back then, when you're looking at publications and what people were reading, you have a lot of analytical. We have journals and those are all great and I think that they're wonderful.

But when you're looking for something maybe digestible, very current, what's going on in the world right now that you should be aware of or in the future? And then what are your peers looking at and talking about and discussing?

I think that that's a, you know, perfect point for us where, you know, news coverage, what's going on kind of reporting, but also just, you know, as a, the commentary and, you know, a weekly, here's what people are talking about now. And you can see that and read that, you know, certainly, you know, what's, what do people think about that tax change or that policy?

Are people seeing something coming down the pipeline that you should be aware of, you might want to be looking for? Those are all things, I believe tax note states kind of brings to the state tax world.

But like we've talked about, right. There's like so many different tax types, jurisdictions, et cetera.

Right.

So then how do you kind of break down what you feel like the audience needs to see and read.

As you say? One, I do. We want to be well rounded.

So obviously a lot of tax news, New York and California, but the person in a smaller state, they have issues too that they, that they want to, you know, that they need to know or want to know about or want to. So we want to make sure that we're, we're getting that viewpoint.

We want to make sure we're getting different perspectives, academics perspective, not just the practitioners. What else? Why are people pushing, say, different policies or legislation and what issues do they see? So those are all things also. What's out there?

What issues are you seeing over and over again in litigation? Are there trends that maybe people should be paying attention to that somebody might see that? Who's on the front lines?

Are there trends of legislation and tax breaks or different types of taxes? The New Taxes, industry, as you say we've been, as the years have gone on, technology has changed so much.

The industry has changed so much about those technologies. Taxes sometimes lag behind a bit. And sometimes trying to get up to speed with taxes on technologies can cause issues and questions that people have.

And sometimes it can be an open question that doesn't. When I'm looking for, say, commentary, I don't always looking for somebody to give the answer.

Sometimes it's just, here's a question, I don't know, but here's a question that needs to be solved or here's a question that we're going to have to address and we're going to have to deal with or the states may have to deal with and states may have to address at some point in time. Taxes can be very, can be very fun. And like I said, the debate is there.

Right. We were right. Colorado had a recent court. I feel like I'm reading a lot of Colorado court cases here recently between the cities and the state.

Right.

When Colorado came, Colorado Supreme Court came out with the Netflix decision. And when you read that decision, they're talking about the definition of corporeal and what that means.

And I was like, all right, here's our Black law reference, right. And so when we're telling people who don't live in that landscape, like, what are you talking about?

What do you mean that, you know, you can touch Netflix or it's something to your senses. It's like, well, can you do we need to go back to fourth grade of like or even younger than that kindergarten of our what are our senses?

And if you can see something that's, you know, in Colorado's eyes in this specific instance. Right. Corporeal being something that you can, you know, identify with the senses. And if site is a sense and you can watch a movie. Right.

Taxable in the state of Colorado. And so kind of the definition of that. Right. Has potentially huge impacts on how from a sales tax perspective things are going to be taxed.

And you know, mine and Stacy's home state, so those things. Right. And that's just one state.

Are those.

Items that everyone wants to see. But someone in Rhode island might not be following what's happening in Colorado.

So that's where you all come in and, you know, fill the gap and help us build those relationships, you know, with other people doing business across the country and across the world, for that matter.

Yeah.

And it's an awareness, too, Right.

Because I mean, even though Colorado was, you know, they addressed that corporeal definition doesn't mean that Rhode island might not jump on that bandwagon, you know, or you know, it's something I think just awareness is key.

Exactly. And you know, awareness of, you know, what's out there, what what could be.

Like I said, could, could Rhode island look at that or could Rhode island decide that that's, you know, totally different but knowing it's out there?

And then also as you mentioned, the Netflix taxes, that's litigation, that's in a number of states with very similar ideas, very similar statutes and definitions but not quite the same and not getting the exact same result every time. But it's out there. And those are issues where it's helpful to know.

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended nor should it be relied upon as legal tax, accounting or investment advice. You should consult with a competent professional to discuss specifics of your situation and the applicability of the information presented.