Congratulations again, Dave!

It was great to have you come to speak to our public finance class yesterday. Thanks again for coming to speak to us. It is completely awesome for a professor to bring a guest speaker who has applied the lessons she taught 25 years ago in a way that makes me so proud!

What I did not realize when I introduced you to the class yesterday is that you have just won yet another accolade: making the annual top 100 most influential people list on the cover of WebCPA's annual issue.



As we can see from the partial screenshot above, you have some very impressive company. Most of the top 100 are in the private sector, including many important CEOs. There is one academic on the list, Paul Caron, Dean of the University of Cincinnatti Law School, who publishes the prolific and widely readTaxProf blog that includes links to all things well-informed tax policy decision-makers need to know. All my students should bookmark his blog--not just for this class, but for life. Keeping it in your RSS feed will assure that you are well-informed about tax policy issues that are important for your household, your business life, and your country's economic health.

Then there are a dozen or so public sector officials on the list, including:

President Obama
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner
IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman
National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson
Karin Hawkins, Director of IRS Office of Professional Responsibility
Mary Schapiro, (Chair, Securities & Exchange Commission)
Max Baucus (Chair, Senate Finance Committee)
Barney Frank (Chair, House Financial Services Committee)
Timothy Geithner (Secretary of the Treasury)
Chuck Grassley (Ranking Member, Senate Finance Committee)
Sander Levin (Chair, House Ways & Means Committee)

and---drum roll please--David Williams (3 rows below the "M" in the word "Most" in the picture above), whose complete entry is below.