COURSE NUMBER: MBA227B.1

COURSE TITLE: Taxes and Firm Strategy

UNITS OF CREDIT: 3 units

INSTRUCTOR: Suneel Udpa

E-MAIL ADDRESS: udpa@haas.berkeley.edu

CLASS WEB PAGE LOCATION: bCourses

PREREQUISITE(S): MBA202 Financial Reporting

CLASS FORMAT: Lecture & Class Problems

REQUIRED READINGS: Required Text: Taxes and Business Strategy by Scholes, Wolfson, Erickson, Hanlon, Maydew, and Shevlin. Fifth Edition, Pearson Publishing. ISBN: 978-0-13-275267-1

Recommended Text: Federal Taxation 2019, Rupert and Anderson, 2019 Edition, Pearson Publishing. ISBN: 978-0-13-473830-7

BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE: Take-home project, Home-work assignments, Midterm and Final Exams (Open Book, Open Notes)

CAREER FIELD: This course is appropriate for students interested in investment banking, corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, and strategy consulting.

ABSTRACT OF COURSE’S CONTENT AND OBJECTIVES:

The broad objective of this course is to provide you with a framework of how taxes affect business activities – financing, investing, and operating. You will learn to identify and exploit tax-planning opportunities, integrate tax strategy into corporate decision-making and structure various transactions to optimize after-tax cash flows. The aim of this class is not to turn you into tax specialists. We will not focus on the myriad details and exceptions to the tax law.

We will begin with a quick overview of individual and corporate taxation. We then develop the building blocks of the framework that we will use to apply to specific business decisions. The course then tackles issues relating to optimal organizational form and corporate formation, distribution and liquidation; mergers & acquisitions, compensation, and multinational tax planning.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: 

Suneel Udpa, PhD, is Continuing Lecturer and Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the Earl F. Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2003, 2007, 2010, and 2013, and in 2015 was awarded the Berkeley-Haas Lifetime Achievement Award. Suneel consults extensively in the area of mergers & acquisitions and provides litigation support in cases involving valuation and damage estimation. Suneel received his MS in Business Administration and PhD in Accounting from the John M. Olin School of Business, Washington University in St. Louis.