Vicky Tsilas focuses on the tax aspects of tax-exempt and tax-credit bond transactions and issues related to exempt organizations. Ms. Tsilas represents nonprofit organizations as borrowers and state and local governments as bond counsel in tax-exempt bond financings. She also has extensive experience representing clients in IRS audits of tax-exempt bond financings involving hospital systems, universities, and solid-waste and sewage facilities.
Ms. Tsilas frequently advises colleges, universities, hospitals, and foundations, as well as various public charities, on issues ranging from unrelated business income, joint ventures between nonprofit and for-profit entities, and post issuance compliance responsibilities.
Ms. Tsilas served as an attorney-adviser in the Office of Tax Legislative Counsel's Office of Tax Policy within the U.S. Treasury Department (2012-2014). At Treasury, she had primary responsibility for developing and reviewing IRS regulations and other IRS-published guidance dealing with all aspects of tax-exempt and tax credit bond financings. She also advised Treasury officials in the formulation of the Administration’s policy on tax-exempt and tax credit bond transactions.
Prior to her service with the Treasury Department, Ms. Tsilas served as Assistant Branch Chief in the Tax-Exempt Bond Office, Financial Institutions and Products Division, with the Internal Revenue Service. At that role, she worked on regulations on payments in lieu of taxes, guidance on certain provisions related to research agreements, proposed regulations governing practice before the IRS (Circular 230) as they relate to tax-exempt bonds, final remedial action regulations, and a number of arbitrage-related issues. She was selected to serve as the Chief Counsel representative to the Tax-Exempt Bond Focus Group, which provides recommendations to IRS agents dealing with complicated tax-exempt bond issues.
Ms. Tsilas was a tax associate at Ballard Spahr from February 1999 to April 2003, and of counsel from May 2008 to June 2010. She served as an attorney-adviser to the Honorable Laurence J. Whalen of the U.S. Tax Court in Washington, D.C., from 1997 to 1999.
