William H. Byrnes, IV

Professor William H. Byrnes, IV, a U.S. attorney, is the Founder of the Walter H. & Dorothy B. Diamond International Tax Program, that has been hosted at St Thomas University School of Law (Miami). Professor Byrnes is a Visiting Professor of International Taxation to the Masters program of the Faculty of Commerce, Law, and Management at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) and before that was the coordinator and lecturer of the International Tax Masters of Commerce program at RAU (Johannesburg). Professor Byrnes has partnered with Central Law Training and STEP to offer a complete Diploma Program to its members in the field of International Tax Planning.

Professor Byrnes pioneered distributive legal education through creating the first Internet delivered legal degree in the United States, offered by a School of Law accredited by the American Bar Association. In 1994, he created the three and five day training program International Taxation and Offshore Financial Centers, partnering since 1997 with EuroMoney-Institutional Investor, which he has taught in-house to banks, exchanges, and governments, in Hong Kong, Singapore, London, Miami, Lisbon, Mauritius, Dominica, and South Africa. Also, he has chaired, as well as presented at, many corporate and private banking conferences globally, including Malaysia, Bahamas, Cayman Islands, India and South Africa. His presentations have included topics as diverse as forecasting economics of B2B integrated supply chains to the discriminatory US implementation and affect of transfer pricing regulations to Indian/Pacific Rim States.

Besides authoring and editing several case books for the program published in cooperation with Kluwer Law International such as Principles of International Taxation and also Offshore Financial Centers, he co-authored the book Tax Reform for South Africa and served as Managing Editor of the Exchange Control Encyclopaedia, which was amalgamated into Butterworths’ Exchange Control Encyclopaedia. For Thomson Tax, he is the author for the US Chapter for International Tax Systems and Planning Techniques, a series by Roy Saunders and Miles Dean published in loose-leaf and on Checkpoint. He served as an editor to Walter Diamond of the Diamond loose-leaf series: Tax and Trade Briefs, Matthew Bender (New York) as well as an editor to Barry Spitz for the Lexicon in the Butterworths’ loose-leaf Spitz’s Tax Havens Encyclopaedia. He is Co-Author of the forthcoming loose-leaf series, Offshore Trusts & Companies Laws, Analysis and Tax Planning. He was a consultant editor for Kluwer Law International (London) for many years before he was a consultant editor for Richmond Law & Tax. He also worked on the International Fiscal Association’s (IFA) methodology of categorization of taxation.

Before full time teaching, Professor Byrnes was a senior manager then associate director, international tax, Coopers and Lybrand, which subsequently amalgamated into Price Waterhouse. His primary clients at Coopers & Lybrand were multinational investment and also private banks, insurance companies, technology companies, and company service providers. Over the last ten years, he has lived in Asia, Europe, Africa and The Americas.

Professor Byrnes has been employed as a consultant to a number of governments on their tax policy, including South Africa, Botswana, The United Kingdom, The British Virgin Islands, The Turks and Caicos Islands, Anguilla and Montserrat. He is the primary author and team leader of the UK commissioned Byrnes Report, forthcoming in 2004, on the Economic and Socio-Economic Impact of the Tax Savings Directive and EU Code of Conduct on Business Taxation upon Selected Offshore Financial Centers as well as a Competitiveness Report for Selected Offshore Financial Centers.

He serves on the board of various 501(c)(3) tax exempt charities and in 1989 founded the Last Hope Recovery Center (d.b.a. Abstract Bookshop & Café) in New Orleans, a forty person residential center dealing with dual diagnosis. The Abstract has been mentioned in several press articles, one of which received the American journalism award for its pictorial portrayal of the suffering of residents with AIDS.

In 2002, he was one of six founding board members of the Royal Society of Fellows, which has grown to several hundred members and is now recognized as presenting the leading intra-governmental-professional conference on the subject of anti-money laundering and international tax planning. Conferences have been held in Bahamas, Cayman Islands, and Miami.

He holds a degree in Political Economics of the law track of the Murphy Institute of Tulane University and a Juris Doctorate from Loyola University School of Law. His LL.M., specialized in European Business and Taxation, is from the University of Amsterdam Faculty of Law and the Europa Institute. His fellowship was granted by the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation in conjunction with the University of Amsterdam after presenting his thesis in the field of inter-company cross-border pricing.