JOB DESCRIPTION
Position Title: Senior Consultant, Severance Tax
Office Location: Houston, Texas (West Houston)
What Gives Us Purpose
Merit Advisors is a team of expert consultants committed to crafting holistic solutions that improve your cash flow and add profit back to your bottom line. With a track record spanning over 25 years, Merit offers deep experience in energy, heavy industry, and construction, and works with companies across the commercial sector. Merit’s culture includes collaboration with all levels that enables faster growth within the company and a strong emphasis on Merit’s core values – Lasting Relationships, Extreme Ownership, Getting Better Every Day and Team-First.
What We Seek
We are seeking a Severance Tax Senior Consultant who will join our team working with our clients to plan for and manage various severance tax needs. The right person brings experience, expertise, and an unrelenting drive to improve cash flows for clients. You will need to have a self- driven, conscientious mentality with a commitment to high-quality work.
What Your Day Will Look Like
This is a consulting position, and your work with us will include assisting clients in various capacities related to severance tax matters. Our client projects include severance tax refund claims, deduction calculations, process reviews, and training. You will be supported by and work directly with the Severance Tax Director and others across the organization to provide unrelenting client service and high-quality deliverables to our clients and be given the opportunity to utilize your technical, analytical, and soft skills while working with our clients. In general, you can expect to:
- Aggregate, sanitize, and analyze client data to calculate deductions, qualify incentives, and provide other services for Merit’s severance tax clients
- Perform detailed reviews of client data to quantify refund opportunities, go-forward tax savings, and assessment reduction opportunities
- Perform technical tax research on relevant issues in multiple states
- Assist in performing company research for utilization in proposal and prospect development initiatives
- Continuously develop tax expertise, analytical capabilities, and soft skills
- Participate in client meetings and gain experience articulating our findings to clients
- Contribute significantly to the development of a dynamic and growing consulting practice
You’re perfect for this role if you possess:
- Severance tax consulting experience in multiple states, particularly in TX, OK, CO, UT, and NM
- Experience with marketing cost qualification and calculation
- Experience with incentive qualification and calculation
- Ability to apply your technical expertise to varied client issues/needs and provide creative, insightful analysis
- Ability to effectively prioritize and manage multiple projects, activities, and deadlines
- Software proficiency, including Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and Alteryx
- Ability to travel out of town from time to time for internal and client meetings
What You Bring
- Bachelor’s degree in finance, accounting, business administration, or similar field
- Two to five years of severance tax experience (with a consulting firm a plus)
- Strong technology skills utilizing Access, Excel, Alteryx, etc.
- Experience using CCH/AnswerConnect or other tax research tools
- Excellent oral and written communication skills, strong interpersonal skills, and ability to communicate clearly, effectively and persuasively
- Willing and able to develop client relationships and work effectively in a team environment
- CPA or APA a plus but not required
- Strong history of proven results and high performance.
What We Provide
At Merit, we ask a lot of our employees, which is why we give so much in return. In addition to your competitive salary, PTO program, medical/dental/vision plan, and matching 401(k), you’ll enjoy company-sponsored events, continuous learning, and career advancement opportunities, and the flexibility to manage your work/life balance.
What We Do
Merit Advisors provides our partners in the energy industry with the best financial solutions and vision to uncover overlooked savings. The team at Merit is built on decades of experience and insight throughout the entire energy value chain. Our strategic approach combined with our expertise, proprietary technology and data makes Merit Advisors the best at extracting trapped value and improving cash flow for our partners. When you partner with Merit Advisors, you get experienced energy professionals who are focused on delivering results so you can stay focused on your business.
Initially founded in 1998 as an appraisal and property tax consulting firm based in Gainesville, TX, Merit is constantly evolving to better serve its clients. This client-focused nature is demonstrated by various service lines and offices in geographically strategic locations (Dallas and Houston, TX and Oklahoma City and Tulsa, OK).
Our 350+ clients range from publicly traded corporations to individual small business owners and are serviced by a team that combines engineers, appraisal and valuation experts and seasoned tax and consulting professionals that bring together the perfect balance of high quality and diverse solutions of a larger firm while not foregoing the “high level touch” customer service of a boutique firm.
