Richard Larkins’ roots are in Seattle, Washington. His career path as a tax lawyer, however, has taken him to the “other” Washington – D.C. to be exact. Larkins is currently a partner at Ernst & Young, known as one of the “Big Four” accounting firms in the country. He recently took time to reflect on his Husky Experience, his professional journey and what inspires him to give back.
Q: What led to your decision to attend the University of Washington?
Richard Larkins: I’m from Seattle, so it was pretty natural. I grew up in the Rainier Beach area of the city and attended John F. Kennedy Memorial High School in Burien near the airport, which is now Kennedy Catholic. I only really applied to two schools, Gonzaga in Spokane and the UW. When I think back on it, I never strongly considered going anywhere else. I had a wonderful experience at the University of Washington, I’m glad I went. It is a fantastic school.
Q: How would you describe your experience as a student at the UW?
Larkins: I was a business major so I spent a lot of time going to the business school. I lived on campus all four years. I did spend one year at Yakima Valley Junior College. I played basketball there and transferred to the UW my sophomore year. The entire time I was at the university I spent in the dorms. I was on North Campus entirely so I lived in McMahon, Haggett and ultimately Hansee. I had a great experience there, I had a lot of fun. Really enjoyed my classes, as a native Seattleite I was very comfortable there.
Q: Who was your favorite professor and why?
Larkins: My major was business administration with a concentration in accounting which is effectively an accounting degree. I became interested in accounting while I was in high school. I took a bookkeeping class that I really liked. I decided that I would then go to college and major in accounting. I took a tax class in my accounting program with Bill Resler. I think he is still there in an emeritus role. He was such a dynamic and fun teacher, and really made tax fun and interesting. It actually made me want to focus on tax which ended up being my focus for my professional life.
Q: Describe how your career path led to your current position with Ernst & Young.
Larkins: I graduated from the UW in March of 1984. At the time, I planned on being a CPA (certified public accountant) and focusing on tax because I had taken a couple of tax courses with Bill Resler, and really liked it. I really wasn’t considering law school at that point. I passed the CPA exam and took a job with Arthur Andersen & Company, working in their tax department in Seattle. At this point, I’d essentially spent my whole life in Seattle. I grew up in Seattle, I’d gone to undergraduate school in Seattle, I’d now graduated and was starting my professional career in Seattle.
After about three years of working at Arthur Andersen and doing tax on the accounting side, I became interested in going to law school. I wanted to become a tax lawyer. I still wanted to do tax, but I wanted to do it more from the legal side than the accounting side. In 1987, I left my job at Arthur Andersen and moved to Chicago to go to law school at the Northwestern University School of Law. I was one of those rare folks when I went to law school because I knew what area of law I wanted to practice when I got out. I was there for three years, graduated from Northwestern in 1990. I passed the Illinois bar, so I got my law degree and my law license. I practiced for a little over a year at a large Chicago law firm. Then I ended up getting a job with the IRS chief counsel’s office in Washington, D.C., the office that drafts all the tax rules, rulings, and regulations. That seemed like a pretty exciting opportunity so I left Chicago for D.C. in 1992.
I was at the IRS chief counsel’s office for a few years and then got the opportunity to work as a special assistant to the assistant attorney general in charge of the tax division of the U.S. justice department. It was a political position and I was part of the Clinton Administration. The basic job of the assistant attorney general is to supervise all of the federal tax litigation in the country and my function was to assist her in doing that. My particular area of focus was on appeals and settlements. I would look at tax settlements and appeals, essentially federal tax cases that the government had lost and was appealing, or they had won but the taxpayer was appealing. In most cases when the taxpayer appealed we defended our victory in the trial court. In the cases where the government has lost and is deciding whether to appeal, sometimes there are disagreements as to whether or not the case should be appealed. So I worked on those cases to make a recommendation as to whether the case should be appealed or not. My boss, the assistant attorney general, had the final word on that.
After a few years, I went back into the private sector and I worked in the DC office of a big New York law firm. Then I went from there to the D.C. offices of a couple of accounting firms, KPMG then back to Arthur Andersen. By about 2001, I was back at Arthur Andersen in their national office where their national experts are. By then the area of law that I focused on, from my IRS days, was corporate finance. So essentially by that point, I was an expert in the taxation of corporate financial transactions. I was at Arthur Andersen when it failed. It collapsed as a consequence of its involvement with Enron.
In the aftermath of Arthur Andersen’s collapse, my practice group moved over to Ernst & Young LLP, another Big 4 accounting firm. I joined EY’s national tax practice in D.C. So that is how I ended up here in 2002. I came over as a direct admit partner. I’m now in Ernst & Young’s national office where I am a financial transactions specialist. I’m a partner and I’ve been here going on 13 years now.
Q: What aspect of your job gives you the most satisfaction?
Larkins: Why would someone like tax? It’s really complicated and it’s changing constantly, and it’s really challenging. If you talk to a lot of tax people and I’m certainly similar in this regard, what a lot of people like about tax is that it is kind of like a really hard jigsaw puzzle. You have to take complex transactions and break them down and really understand what is happening with the transaction, and then you have to take a really complicated tax law and try to apply it in a way that makes sense. It can be fun in the same way that a really difficult jigsaw puzzle is fun. If you like hard jigsaw puzzles, you’d say well I get that, it sounds interesting. If you hate jigsaw puzzles you’d say that sounds dreadful! The other thing that makes it fun is that it’s constantly changing. So it’s not like it ever gets static, where I’m doing the same jigsaw puzzle every day. Tax is constantly changing, the law is changing hugely every few years. So it’s always new, you can never relax. It never gets boring.
Q: What career accomplishments are you most proud of?
Larkins: Anyone who is working at a big accounting firm or law firm will tell you that the crowning moment of their professional life is when they make partner.
Q: You contribute to the Business Writing Workshop program at OMA&D’s Instructional Center (IC) even though you, as a student, did not use the IC. What inspires you to give back to this program?
Larkins: I’ve always wanted to support the university and I’m now in a position where I can. The experience I had there and the education I got there are a big part of that. I developed my interest in tax law when I was at the university, I got the educational base to become a CPA at the university. A lot of the things the university did for me are benefiting me to this day. In general, I have a feeling that I need to give back.
Then the question is, what is the best way to do that? Obviously the easiest way is to contribute money. Then the question is, how best to direct that in a way that would be the most helpful? I wanted to do something that helps minority students at the school and I thought the Instructional Center would be the most impactful place to help since statistics indicate that so many students, particularly minority students, come to the school and need help in terms of putting themselves on a path to success. I wanted to do something that would be really impactful in terms of helping with those efforts. I thought that the Instructional Center would be the right place.
I also do contribute to the accounting development fund at the UW as well, so I do contribute to the business school and the accounting program.
Q: Are you involved in any other types of philanthropy or volunteer work?
Larkins: I also am pretty heavily involved in supporting my law school alma mater Northwestern. I support them financially. Northwestern interviews all their law school candidates and I am interviewer for the law school as well. I’ve been doing that for about 15 years now.
I also chair the Ernst & Young “Light the Night Walk” group. It’s a national walk, put on by the national Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. They do an annual walk to raise money for cancer research. In the D.C. area, Ernst & Young raises somewhere in the range of $20,000-$27,000 every year. For me it’s personal because I am a childhood cancer survivor. I had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma when I was in high school.
Q: What advice would you give to other alumni who are interested in giving back to the UW?
Larkins: I would strongly encourage people to give back and focus on the area of the university that you feel most connected to. There is always something you can do to help.