Benjamin Franklin said there is nothing certain but death and taxes. If you find yourself dealing with the latter, you might want to contact this week’s Portrait, Roz Sutch. In 2009, Sutch became the youngest person to become a shareholder at Drucker & Scaccetti, and in that same year was recognized by the Pennsylvania Institute of Certified Public Accountants as a “40 under 40” member watch. Earlier this year, she was awarded the Michael A. DeAngelis Award by LaSalle University’s Accounting Department, its most distinguished honor. An ally to the community, Sutch is well known as an expert on LGBT tax and financial-planning issues. She makes regular presentations to both members and advisers of the LGBT community and has been an active member of the Independence Business Alliance for more than two years. On June 27, Sutch was elected to the board of the IBA.
PGN: Where do you hail from?
RS: Born, raised and educated in Philadelphia. I grew up in East Falls and lived there until I graduated from college.
PGN: I read that you’ve been working since you were 16.
RS: Yes, I went to a Philadelphia public school and they had a business academy that had a work-study program. I’ve been a Type-A personality since birth and I’d always wanted to be an accountant. I made a declaration to myself at 16 and picked up the Yellow Pages — this was before Google. I looked up accounting firms and started making phone calls. I must have called the right person on the right day at the right time. They needed help so I became administrative support for the personnel department. I was only there for a month but I learned important basic things like how to use a fax machine, how to do mail merges and a lot of other things I wouldn’t have known how to do at 16. Because of that experience, that same summer I also worked for the Philadelphia Department of Revenue. Because of my experience with those two jobs, my next-door neighbor, a long-time friend and mentor, got me a position doing administrative support in his tax department. I stayed there for two years and then started working for a sole proprietor actually doing tax work myself. An H&R Block-type deal, I was there for about three-and-a-half years and then I started here.
PGN: Wow. And how did your Type-A personality manifest itself?
RS: I was always very independent. I knew what I wanted and would attack whatever I needed to accomplish it. I’d set goals and crush them.
PGN: Do you have any siblings?
RS: Do I have any siblings? I have 10 siblings! And that’s my first connection to the LGBT community, my eldest brother. He passed away in 1992 of AIDS. I was 12 at the time. He was the oldest and I’m the youngest so there was a large gap between us but we were very close; he was like a second father to me. I used to spend summers with him in Wildwood, N.J. He was the manager of a female-impersonation show and he was in the show too. So I’d basically spend summers in a house full of drag queens. My next-closest sibling in age was nine years apart from me so I was raised kind of like an only child, which is strange coming from such a large family!
PGN: How big was the gap between you and the brother you stayed with?
RS: About 30 years.
PGN: Wow. What did the parents do? Well, with 10 kids we know some of what they did for a lot of the time.
RS: [Laughs] My dad did everything from driving a truck to huckstering. For a while he drove kids to school in a van, a kind of private school bus, and my mother actually worked in childcare, shocker. But it was a yours, mine and ours situation; my dad was married twice before my mom, my mom once before my dad and I’m the only one from the two of them. It’s a whole “Brady Bunch” deal.
PGN: What’s a fun family memory?
RS: My immediate family is like a party unto themselves. There must be 100 of us. The first thing that sprang to mind were the water fights that would break out during summer barbecues. There may have been a hose involved at one point. I recall my mom freaking out because my one brother brought the hose in the house. She put the kibosh on that pretty quick. But there was always something going on.
PGN: That’s funny, as soon as you said water fights I had a flash memory of my brother with the hose inside the house! Who was the troublemaker and who was the funny one?
RS: Out of the 11, the troublemaker was definitely my brother Danny. He’s since passed away. The funniest one is probably Steve. He’s the oldest out of the living siblings. We’ve lost three of them.
PGN: Turning to work, what makes accounting sexy?
RS: [Laughs] Nothing! Well, the fact that there’s always a right answer. I was always more interested in tax law. What makes tax exciting is when you have a big win, when I can recoup for or save a client a lot of money. We had a client who, due to a simple administrative error was going to lose a credit that they clearly were entitled to. We proved that and I remember getting the letter stating we’d won and running down the hall to the associate I was working with yelling, “We got it! We won!” Everything we do is within the confines of the law but when you are able to use your knowledge to the advantage of your client it’s very satisfying.
PGN: Any crazy tax loopholes you’ve heard about and/or what’s the craziest thing someone’s tried to claim?
RS: Luckily none of our clients are apt to do crazy things but you always hear people trying to take deductions for their animals as dependents and it’s like, “I know your cat feels like your child, but that’s not the way the law is written.”
PGN: What is a tax warrior?
RS: So one of our clients who passed away last year wrote a mantra for us. We got the name Tax Warriors when we entered a soapbox derby to benefit the Arthritis Foundation and we needed a team name. The name stuck and way back when, when we were registering for a website, someone said we should use Tax Warriors. They were joking but since then it’s evolved and become our identity. The gist is that we advocate for our clients the same way the Samurai warriors and the Knights of the Round Table all fought. [Points to several paintings on the wall] This is a pictorial mantra drawn by cartoonist and illustrator Tony Auth.
PGN: You work with a lot of entertainers and sports figures. Why is it that it seems that they’re always getting into trouble with the IRS?
RS: Because people know they have money, so people are always in their pockets. That’s why it’s important that they have good gatekeepers and we’re part of that team that acts as a buffer. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who take advantage of them so we try to be in the middle; it goes athlete, gatekeeper and someone trying to get to the money. You have clients who aren’t equipped to deal with the kind of wealth they receive so suddenly. For athletes especially, there are very specific rules about how their money is allocated. It varies from state to state, so where they choose to reside can make a big difference. Even which city makes a big difference. As you probably know, Philadelphia is very heavily taxed so helping structure their residency and making sure they meet the proper residency requirements is important. For most people, the difference might be negligible, but if they get a $10-million signing bonus, it can be significant. Most teams are not going to allocate for each person based upon the strict interpretations of each city and state — they generally do what’s easiest for them regarding payroll — so we can go in and proactively figure out where the athlete is going to be the entire year and create duty-day schedules that best suit them. There was a recent case where Philadelphia allowed a portion of agent fees to be deducted. Well, that can be significant when an agent takes 3-4 percent. It’s all money we can save for when they retire because they can’t be athletes forever.
PGN: What are some of the specific challenges for the LGBT community, tax-wise?
RS: Pre-Windsor, some states allowed for marriage but the federal government didn’t recognize it. For example, in Massachusetts, the first state to allow gay marriage, you’d have to file jointly in Massachusetts but separately for federal. With a good adviser, you could have filed for protective election, which would allow you to get a refund, should it apply, when marriage equality became law. Post-Windsor, we have the opposite problem. You have to file joint on your federal taxes but many states don’t recognize gay marriage and they all have different things you have to do to file. It’s like 50 states with 50 different sets of rules. When the Windsor case was won, I could see from a tax standpoint how confusing it was going to be and I couldn’t find a single person who was knowledgeable on the subject, so I decided to become the expert. I’ve been a lifelong ally with friends and family in the LGBTQ community so I had a personal interest and wanted to be a resource for the community. And frankly, I also saw a business opportunity. To find balance, I do presentations on it for the community pro bono and I also started doing presentations for practitioners so that there would be more people out there aware of the different specifics under the laws — pre-Windsor, post-Windsor, post-Obergefell. It can have a big economic impact from the standpoint of taxes. Even things like adoptions can also be greatly affected by the marital status.
PGN: What is a need-based benefit?
RS: Anything like food stamps, Medicaid, SSI, financial aid if they have kids, etc. That’s another area where someone may qualify for those benefits as a single person but if they get married, the combined incomes may disqualify them from those benefits — something to consider for all couples straight or gay contemplating marriage. Especially for mature couples, I had one client who we calculated it would cost $50,000 per year, per year to get married. They decided to hold off. Every year I ask if they’re getting married and the one guy tells me, “You’re worse than my fiancé!”
PGN: Other than crunching numbers, what do you like to do?
RS: I power lift. I haven’t competed yet — I tore a rotator cuff — but it’s one of my goals.
PGN: Were you always athletic?
RS: I played JV and varsity sports in high school.
PGN: [Laughs] So you’ve always been around lesbians …
RS: Ha! Yes, there were a few on my teams. Actually my best friend came out to me when we were about 13. I’m sure for her it was the biggest deal in the world to tell me but for me it was totally non-eventful. I was like, OK so what’s going on tonight? Oh, I also took karate for several years. But then a week after I buried my father, my mother was diagnosed with stage-four cancer and died just months after him. It was a tough time and I let myself go. But now I’m back and it’s interesting to see the changes in my body.
PGN: [Laughs] Between your athleticism and activism, how often do people think you’re gay?
RS: That’s funny. I don’t know and I don’t really give a shit if people think I am. Though sometimes if I’m doing an LGBT workshop and I make a reference to my husband it’s funny to see some people’s faces go, “What?” But it’s not like I go out of my way to say, “I’m at this gay event, but I’m not gay!” It’s 2016, who cares? I consider myself part of the community. I’ve been an ally since birth.
PGN: OK, random questions. What was your first car?
RS: A teal Dodge Neon.
PGN: Big night out?
RS: Dinner at a foodie spot and a concert or show. Last show was American Psycho in New York.
PGN: Go-to karaoke song?
RS: I’m such a bad singer. “The Greatest Love of All,” I remember singing that at a sleepover in first grade.
PGN: That’s a tough one!
RS: I didn’t say I sang it well. But I am Alicia Keys in the car.
PGN: Let’s wrap up with your brother, who inspired you to work with the LGBT community.
RS: George, he was great. He spent every summer in Wildwood and each winter in Montreal. He was cremated but I was able to get a headstone placed for him. It’s cool because it’s in a Catholic cemetery but I managed to get two pictures on the headstone, one of him as George and one of him in drag as Liza Minelli. “New York, New York” was his signature song. For my senior music project I arranged the song in his memory. He was very musical and he had a big influence on me. He played the keyboard and it inspired me to take piano from the time I was 8. Because of him, I got into theater and he used to make all my costumes. He was so talented. I used to love watching him and all his friends getting ready for drag shows. I was only 12 when he died but he had a big impact on my life.
PGN: That must have been so difficult to understand.
RS: It was definitely challenging to wrap my head around his death. I didn’t know anything about AIDS and he never told us he was sick. It was so taboo back then. We just got the phone call from Montreal that he had died. So I didn’t really have closure until I went to Canada for the headstone. I was always afraid that my brother died alone but I met up with some of his good friends and they gave me comfort to know that he died surrounded by friends and taken care of. He had community.
For more information about Drucker & Scaccetti, visit www.taxwarriors.com.
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