Kenneth W. Helms, CMI is one of the founders of Vision Taxware LLC and provides high-value domestic and international indirect tax services to Vision’s clients. Mr. Helms leverages his extensive domestic and global indirect tax experience in the e-commerce space to quickly understand, in detail, the client’s operations and impact to the client’s nexus profile. By doing so, Mr. Helms is able to develop multiple options to resolve not only our client’s prospective compliance issues but provides a myriad of solutions to historic liabilities. His achievements in this space include:

Presentations to multiple states’ Ways & Means Committees as the subject matter expert on revenue neutrality relative to the application of indirect taxes on e-commerce retail sale transactions
Authored proposed legislation to several states and jurisdictions to eliminate ambiguity on certain e-commerce transactions
Working with the state’s elected leadership, the Department of Revenue and the industry’s national and state lobbying group, stopped a Department of Revenue’s internal initiative to apply a communication tax to e-commerce transactions and eliminated a potential $100MM liability of the company
Working with the state’s elected leadership and the Director of the Department of Revenue stopped the Governor’s Proposed Budget from the taxation of e-commerce transactions of the hospitality industry
Working with various states’ Departments of Revenue to eliminate ambiguity within the states’ Audit Groups
Developed, submitted and secured a Binding Tarriff Information decision applicable to all EU-Member States which saved over €500,000 in import duties per transaction a certain good sold via e-commerce
Developed for various e-commerce clients domestic and global taxability rules and coding requirements for the client’s ERP
Has saved or eliminated over $300,000,000 in indirect taxes for his employers and clients
Mr. Helms is a member of the Institute for Professionals in Taxation (IPT) and holds the certification of Certified Member of the Institute (CMI) in US sales and use tax. Mr. Helms was the first Chair of IPT’s VAT Education Committee, is a current member of IPT’s CMI Committee (sales and use tax), frequent speaker at various tax symposiums and advanced tax schools and teaches advanced audit management and tax planning at the IPT School II (sales and use tax). Mr. Helms is also a frequent contributor to various tax publications.

Mr. Helms holds a Bachelor of Science in Accounting from Eastern Illinois University. Mr. Helms and his wife live in the Atlanta, GA metro area and are both volunteers for several philanthropic organizations fighting hunger and supporting disadvantaged youth.

Before founding Vision Taxware LLC, Patrick Grady spent over 30 years in corporate IT supporting the retail office products and quick service restaurant industries.

He has designed, developed and supported supply chain and logistics systems, order entry and fulfillment systems, item master data management functions. While working in the restaurant industry he supported point-of-sale, mobile app and back office management systems.

He has comprehensive knowledge of all phase of the system development life cycle, from design and proof of concept to implementation and rollout.

Mr. Grady has witnessed the effects of the opioid crisis through family connections. He sees medical marijuana as a safe, legal life-saving alternative to the highly addictive narcotic pain relief options available today.

Mr. Grady previously worked at Boise Cascade Office Products and OfficeMax before joining Capgemini America in 2014 as a support specialist, expanding into business and technical analysis while serving in a contractor role at McDonalds, Inc.

Mr. Grady holds a B.S. in Mathematics and Computing from the University of Notre Dame. He and his wife, a health care professional, currently live in the Chicago, IL metro area.

Back near the turn of the century, Mr. Grady was a three-day champion on Jeopardy! pocketing winnings of more than $25,000.