About

This section will cover the origins of ElectoralCollege.org and how it came to focus on integrated systems approach for many reforms.

The domain name of ElectoralCollege.Org was originally registered on April 7, 2000. But before then, I had registered two tax reform domain names in October 1998 and within a month registered two genealogical domain names.

I was also interested in politics and especially the presidential election of 2000. On April 7, I was surprised to find that the official information on the Electoral College was and is still at National Archives . Within minutes the domain of ElectoralCollege.Org was registered. The most important election in the United States is the election of the president via the Electoral College. It is also the most important election for tax reform.

My interest in the potential for tax reform in the U.S. began when I wrote a term paper on an unique feature of the French tax system in a MIT tax course taught by Daniel M. Holland. He was later to become the long-time editor of the National Tax Journal (NTJ) and the President of the National Tax Association (NTA). I have been a member of the NTA for many years since 1998. I have read the NTJ and attended a few of their annual November meetings in Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and Providence, and their annual Spring Symposiums in Washington. My role has been primarily as a listener and not as a contributor. Hopefully, now is my time to contribute.

My knowledge and experience in taxes and programing enabled me to win a competitive contract with the National Tax Office of the IRS. The contract was to develop a program for Texas Instrument's TI-58C programmable calculator that would enable IRS field auditors to calculate the taxes and penalties for individuals. It was based on the Reagan Administration's first tax reform law, the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981. That success led me to found Zyntax, Inc.to develop tax applications for the more advanced and versatile TI-59 calculator. With the use of magnetic cards, tax professionals could also calculate state taxes for New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California. Work on the TI-59 culminated with developing the Expatriate Tax Program for Ernst & Whinney.

Ernst and Whinney was one of the Big 8 CPA Firms that later merged with Arthur Young in 1989 to form Ernst & Young. It is now one of the Big Four accounting firms along with Deloitte, KPMG and PwC. Prior to bidding on the IRS contract, I was the national director of tax training at Coopers & Lybrand. They merged with Price Waterhouse in 1989. While head of tax training, I was selected by the National Director of Taxes and the tax partner, who was slated to become head of Expatriate Tax Services, to administer the program in the Spring of 1980. This required me to work with many tax partners throughout the country to assign tax professionals to travel overseas to service the firm's expatriate clients. I then had a five-week assignment to cover our clients in several cities in Saudi Arabia, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.

See the Zyntax, Inc. - Two AI Chat Summaries of My Work Effort And Images.

With the advent of home computers on the horizon, I next developed a simple tax program to calculate individual income taxes based on Form 1040. It was for the Timex Sinclair 1000 (T/S 1000} that Timex had licensed from Sinclair Research. It would easily connect to your TV. My program was expected to cost $20 with an estimated sales volume of 500,000 units. The plan was to offer it before Christmas of 1983. My royalty was to be 68 cents per unit. During the Spring of 1983, no agreement was prepared and I basically left the tax field in May.

In June of 1983, I joined the IBM Corporate Telecommunications Division where I developed planning models using either Lotus or Excel. The major system was a telecommunications measurement system called TRIM. The acronym C/B SQUAT was used to remember the key components of Costs, Benefits, Security, Quality, User satisfaction, Availability and Time.

I then moved to another division that focused on marketing to the financial community. I concentrated on investment management and derivatives. I continued my education at the NYU Graduate School of Business and became a Chartered Financial Analyst. Later, I took advantage of an IBM early retirement package and immediately became a consultant to a small firm that had been a pioneer in developing a system for managing portfolios that included international securities and currencies. They had two big potential clients -- Fidelity Investments and Templeton -- for their new system that was being developed to run on an IBM computer. My mission was to help sell the company. It was not an easy sell because of development problems that I could not address. Eventually, the company was sold to ADP. I received my fee and went back to school at Norwalk Community College (NCC) and Fairfield University to learn how to develop web-based applications for the domains that I owned. That is where the story will end for now, except for some closing comments.

In October of 2019, I learned how to solve one of the most complex basis problems you might encounter in a new tax reform system. The next step was to determine the fairest tax rate to use to calculate the tax on the transfer of appreciated assets. The new tax system is designed to increase the taxes on capital and limit the credits, deductions and exclusions to raise most U.S. citizens' standard of living and happiness.

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