But give her the right documents, and Green, an assistant professor of accounting and taxation at the Gabelli School of Business since 2015, can do something akin to it.

Green’s expertise is in accounting for income taxes and the lengths that corporations go to reduce the taxes they pay to the government.

In an ongoing research study titled, “Can Financial Statement Information Predict Taxable Income? Evidence from the Valuation Allowance,” Green and her co-authors examine how one can predict a firm’s privately reported taxable income by examining publicly available financial statements.

This is possible because in the United States, all publicly traded companies are required to file a financial statement—specifically Form 10-K—with the Securities and Exchange Commission and share both the current and future tax effects of the economic transactions that they engage in.

Losses as Assets

Those future effects result in either a future expense, which is called a deferred tax liability, or a future benefit, which is called a deferred tax asset. Somewhat counterintuitively, a firm’s net operating loss is classified as a deferred tax asset, because how losses are treated for financial reporting purposes differ from how they’re treated for tax purposes.

“As a business, if I prepare my financial statements and I have a loss, I just report that loss in the financial statements. When I prepare my tax return, my taxable income is bounded at zero. I can’t report negative taxable income on my tax return,” Green said.

“In that scenario, I’ll actually report lower financial statement income compared to my taxable income. What the IRS does is it allows firms to take that loss and either carry it forward or, before the law changed last year, carry it back, and use it to offset taxable income in either of those two periods. It’s reported as an asset on the financial statements, because in the future, I’ll be able to use it to reduce my taxable income.”

When a business reports a deferred tax asset, it is also obligated to report whether it’ll recognize it in the future. The catch? One can only claim it if one has had or expects to have taxable income. If the business does not expect to have taxable income in the future, the value of that asset is worth less, and must be reported as such.

Green’s research shows that the “valuation allowance,” as it’s known, is what allows one to get a glimpse into a firm’s otherwise private financial machinations.

“Say I had a deferred tax asset of $100, but I only think I’ll be able to utilize $30 of it. Then I would record it as a valuation allowance of $70 against the asset. That would reduce the net value of the asset down to $30. In order to determine whether or not I need that valuation allowance, I have to consider sources of future taxable income,” she said.

“As a manager, I have to essentially forecast what I think my taxable income will be into the future. When I put a valuation allowance on this deferred tax asset, I’m essentially saying, ‘I don’t think that I’m going to have sufficient taxable income in the future to offset.’ ”

Changes enacted to the tax code by Congress last year have changed some ways the valuation allowance can be used, but Green said it’s too soon to see the effects of the change because of a lack of available data. The law also addressed tax avoidance, another area that Green has written on, in papers such as “The Influence of a Firm’s Business Strategy on its Tax Aggressiveness,” which she co-wrote in 2016.

Innovative for Business Purposes, Innovative for Tax Purposes

“Tax avoidance is anything that a firm does to reduce its effective tax rate. It’s anything that a firm does, from something as benign as investing in municipal bonds to something more egregious, like participating in tax shelters,” she said.

“What we find is that firms that are innovative for business purposes are also innovative for tax purposes, and as a result they tend to take more risk. Firms that tend to be less risky tend to have higher tax rates, but their rates tend to be more consistent over time.”

Like death, taxes are said to be one of the few things certain in life, and the never-ending areas of life they can affect are a source of fascination for Green.

“I tell my students that the universe of tax is huge, and I only know a small part of it, and when they start my class, they know a tiny dot of it. By the end of it, it’s going to expand a little bit,” she said.

“It’s important to know that they can’t know everything, just like I can’t know everything, but you should always be willing to learn.”

Last fall, she and her valuation paper co-authors attended in a roundtable at Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington, D.C., to help develop a business tax model to predict corporate tax revenues using publicly available data.

“The thing I found interesting was that everybody in that room was generally interested in learning about how this information could predict future taxable income. For certain governmental organizations, it may help them determine what revenues are going to be that feed into the budget, or for other organizations or agencies, it can help them determine what the revenue impact of a change in tax law will actually be,” she said.

“That is useful, so I like being able to say what I’m working on matters beyond the ivory towers, if you will.”

A native of Wooster, Ohio, Gorman is a member of the Gabelli School’s inaugural Lincoln Center class. He’s graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Global Business, and he’s one of the top students in his year. But he didn’t get there without a little help.

During his junior year, he earned an internship with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the world’s largest private cancer center, through an interaction he had with Ian Cairns, GABELLI ’18.

“He said, ‘I like the things that you said in class. I’m interning at Memorial Sloan and part of our role is to help recruit,” recalled Gorman. “Why don’t you send me your resume?”

Cairns passed Gorman’s resume along to recruiters at the hospital. After being interviewed, he was offered a role as an investment management intern. When his internship ended, Gorman helped to recruit and interview other Fordham students for his role, just as Cairns had done for him.

“If you like your employer, and you like Fordham, then you want to help them both find one another,” he said, adding that he hopes younger classmates will follow his and Cairns’ example.

After completing several internships, Gorman served as a chief economist for the Gabelli School’s Student-Managed Investment Fund. He also worked on the Dean’s Council alongside Vincent DeCola, S.J., assistant dean of the Gabelli School of Business, to help improve the academic experience of undergraduates at the Lincoln Center campus. And he’s volunteered at open houses for admitted students and events for first-year students.

“I remember being in their place four years ago and trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and talking to current students was very helpful,” said Gorman.

Hu— who is graduating with a Master of Science in taxation— has helped to organize networking events with Fordham alumni as a board member of the Fordham Accounting and Tax Society. She also helped spearhead a career fair with representatives from firms like Friedman LLP and Ernst & Young. Last spring, she put together an event with a professional English-language teacher for international students interested in improving their English.

Her drive to help other students in her program was inspired by a phrase her mother, a quality controller at a food company, used to say to her growing up.

“She would always tell me that ‘helping others is helping yourself,’” recalled Hu, a native of Nehe, China. “That helped to build my character. I never go somewhere and expect that I could just receive things and take that for granted.”

Hu said her father, a part-time computer shop owner and farmer, would talk about macroeconomics around the house when she was young.

“He wasn’t able to go to business school but supported my decision to go,” she said. “I was able to stand on his shoulders, learn more, and see a broader field.”

Hu and Gorman both said the experiential learning opportuni- ties and classes they have had at the Gabelli School helped to shape their post-graduation goals.

Gorman said he has always been interested in math but didn’t know what career path to take until he served on the winning team of the Gabelli School’s Consulting Cup challenge, the biggest on-campus academic competition for sophomores at the school. He also took a financial management course that same year.

“That’s when it clicked that I wanted to try something in the finance area,” said Gorman, who has interned for North Brookside Capital and the French investment bank Société Générale, where he will soon work as a full-time investment banking analyst.

“We were talking about current events around that time, about the border adjustment tax and the tax plan the new administration had been proposing. It was kind of eye opening to see those things in the news and then come to class and put some numbers behind it,” he said.

Hu’s aha moment came in an international taxation course, where she studied the tax systems of the U.S. and foreign countries as well as topics related to tax treaties, transfer pricing, and foreign tax credits.

“I’m interested in how international transactions work and how businesses get taxed in different jurisdictions,” said Hu. “A lot of the logic makes sense to me, especially with my international background.”

Hu recently accepted a position in Ernst & Young’s Diversified Staffing Group in Houston. She said she looks forward to putting her accounting training into action.

“My job would be to become a well-rounded tax professional in the beginning and then specialize in one area,” she said. “It’s really cool to know that what I was learning will apply to my job later on.”

Two of this year’s graduates—Andrew Santis, who is receiving a bachelor’s of science in marketing with a concentration in global business, and Stephanie Ballantyne, who graduates with a dual master’s degree in public accounting and taxation—have worked, lived, and studied in more than a dozen countries between the two of them.

To Ballantyne, the global bent at the Gabelli School felt like home. Born in Germany and raised in Switzerland, she completed her undergraduate degree in accounting finance at the University of Stirling in Scotland, and then worked for Deloitte Zurich before coming to Fordham.

The move was challenging, she said; but then, having attended an international high school and traveled as a student to the likes of Egypt, Russia, and Greece, the challenge was a familiar one.

“I’ve always had culture shock happening at some point or another, but I grew up knowing I’d have an international lifestyle,” said Ballantyne, whose credits include president of the Gabelli School’s Accounting and Tax Society and chief operating officer of the Finance Society.

“I like New York,” she said. “Switzerland is a bit more laid back—they start work earlier, but also leave earlier, and on the weekends their phones are turned off. For someone starting their career, it can seem a bit slow.”

The New York pace has suited Ballantyne. She interned at Deloitte in Manhattan last summer, and by August she had secured a full-time offer.

“It was a big change, coming here—especially because I started at Fordham in 2014 during the polar vortex. There were about two snow days per week, which made it hard to meet people,” she said. “But overall, Fordham was definitely the right choice.”

For Santis, a native New Yorker, it was a study tour to Spain during his junior year that sparked his passion for global business—but his real adventure began when he returned home to his internship at Cardwell Beach, a digital marketing agency.

“My boss knew how much I enjoyed Madrid, and in March he called and said they wanted to offer me compensation for my work, which would be to send me abroad to work for the summer,” he said. “It didn’t even have to be Spain—I could choose any country I wanted.”

His options boundless, Santis chose a multi-city tour of Europe. He began with a week in Paris, and then joined up with fellow Gabelli School students for a summer semester program at Fordham’s London Centre. After London, he continued on to Germany, where he spent a week each in Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, and Munich.

In the mornings Santis explored the city, and in the afternoons, once his New York colleagues were at the office, he worked on creating buyer personas for Cardwell Beach.

“It was definitely a test of strength and character,” Santis said. “I learned a lot about myself by venturing out to another part of the world on my own.”

Both Santis and Ballantyne have jobs lined up following graduation. Ballantyne will continue with Deloitte in Manhattan, and Santis will take a full-time position at Cardwell Beach (a position for which he will craft his own title and job description).

“Fordham prepared me well,” Ballantyne said. “All the opportunities are here—you just have to take the initiative to go get them.”