199 Main Street
Burlington, VT 05402-0190
dir: 802-863-2375
Highly effective, innovative tax attorney with rock-solid business sense.
Roger Prescott leads Downs Rachlin Martin’s tax practice. He provides tax advice and planning to clients on a wide range of issues, including business formation; complex stock and asset acquisitions and dispositions; executive compensation utilizing nonqualified deferred compensation and equity incentive arrangements; and structured financing transactions using federal New Markets, Historic and Solar Energy Tax Credits. Roger also advises clients in connection with a variety of state and local tax matters, including tax audits, appeals and structuring business activities to minimize state tax liabilities.
- Helps clients access financing for the expansion of their businesses utilizing New Markets Tax Credits. Roger has helped obtain financing for new manufacturing facilities, the expansion of dairy and meat processing facilities, construction of a rural health center and a special needs educational facility.
- Advised a developer in connection with $24 million restoration of a historically significant hotel utilizing federal Historic Rehabilitation and New Market Tax Credits.
- Represented clients in successful appeals of sales and income tax assessments.
- Advised tax credit investors in connection with federal solar energy projects.
- Utilized L3C vehicles in connection with community newspaper and farm energy projects.
- Successfully negotiated the refund of several million dollars of sales and use taxes.
- Obtained 100% abatement of non-Vermont income tax assessed against a Vermont captive insurance company.
- Obtained favorable determinations of tax exempt status for several captive insurance companies including exemption under Code Section 501(n).
- Reviewed client tax returns and discovered omitted and underutilized deductions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- Advised clients in connection with $50 million financing utilizing high yield, pay-in-kind debt obligations and $65 million offering of hybrid debt instruments.
- Persuaded the Vermont Supreme Court that our clients were entitled to claim a disputed income tax credit resulting in one of the largest refunds of personal income taxes in the state's history.
New York University Law School, LLM, Tax, 1990
Suffolk University Law School, J.D. cum laude, 1985
University of Vermont, B.A., 1981
Massachusetts, 1985
New York, 1986
Vermont, 1993
- American Bar Association, Tax Section, 1994
- Vermont Bar Association, Co-chair of the Vermont Bar Association Tax Committee
- New England Super Lawyers®: Tax Law, 2014-2017
- Chambers USA, 2011-2018
- Best Lawyers, Tax Law, 1999-2019
- Best Lawyers "Lawyer of the Year", Tax Law, 2014, 2016

199 Main Street
Burlington, VT 05402-0190ph: 802-863-2375
dir: 802-863-2375
fax: 802-862-7512
rprescott@drm.com