This afternoon in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice people will gather to recognize and celebrate Pat Mullarkey who has served for almost four decades as the Chief of the Northern Trial Section of the Civil Section of the Tax Division. He retires after working over 52 years at the Department of Justice. I had the pleasure to work with Pat on several occasions. He is a great lawyer and a great section chief who has mentored hundreds of trial lawyers over the course of his career. You can find an interview of Pat about his career here on PT. More recently Pat was interviewed by Paul Merrion for MLex US Tax Watch (Lexis subscription required).
I reached out to one of his assistants, Henry Riordan, who provided me with the following details about about Pat’s career:
In 1966, Mr. Mullarkey joined the Tax Division as a civil trial attorney. In recognition of his exceptional talent, he was promoted to an Assistant Chief for the Civil Trial Section’s Western Region in 1977, and then to a Special Litigation Counsel position in early 1979. Mr. Mullarkey became the Chief of the Civil Trial Section’s Northern Region in July of 1979 and has served continuously in that capacity since his appointment, except for two periods, one for six months and the other for two years, when he served as the Tax Division’s Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Litigation.
Mr. Mullarkey is a 1962 graduate of Marquette University with a B.S. in Accounting. He received his J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center in 1965, and an LL.M. in Taxation from that same institution in 1967. After law school, Mr. Mullarkey was a judicial law clerk for a federal district court judge in the District of Columbia.
Mr. Mullarkey is a legend in the Department, as well as the federal tax bar. He has been the recipient of a number of governmental awards including the President’s Meritorious Executive Award (twice), the Attorney General’s John Marshal Award for Outstanding Legal Achievement and, most recently, the Attorney General’s Mary C. Lawton Lifetime Service Award. Mr. Mullarkey has been a member of the J. Edgar Murdock Inns of Court of the Tax Court for thirty years. He has served as an instructor at the Department’s National Advocacy Center and bankruptcy schools sponsored by the Office of Chief Counsel, Internal Revenue Service. He has been a panelist at tax law conferences sponsored by the Federal Bar Association, sessions presented by the Tax Section of the American Bar Association and programs presented by other groups. In February 2018, he received the Kenneth H. Liles Award from the Taxation Section of the Federal Bar Association.
Mr. Mullarkey has counseled many attorneys and is well known for his intellect and common sense. He has supervised and mentored generations of attorneys, who have uniformly recognized their tutelage as the best experience in their careers. Mr. Mullarkey’s enthusiasm for tax litigation has been infectious and his expertise and institutional knowledge will be greatly missed.
Section Chiefs in the Civil Trial Section play a critical role in developing tax litigation. Because they serve as the lawyers for the IRS in district and bankruptcy courts, they interact regularly with the attorneys in Chief Counsel’s office where I worked. Pat worked closely with the Chief Counsel attorneys served by the Northern Trial Section which primarily handles cases in the Northeast and he also worked closely with the Procedure and Administration Division of the National Office of Chief Counsel, IRS. I reached out to Drita Tunuzi, currently the Deputy Chief Counsel (Operations) who previously served as the head of Procedure and Administration and who started her career in an office in the Northeast. She had this to say about Pat:
Pat Mullarkey has seen many generations of DOJ and Chief Counsel lawyers over his years and they are all better for having worked for and with him. He has provided outstanding service and wise counsel to the IRS over his career. We wish him well in his retirement.
I also received these comments made by John DiCicco, a colleague of Pat’s at DOJ and a former Acting Assistant Attorney General of the Tax Division:
I am not going to spend time telling you what a great lawyer Pat is. That is indisputable. Suffice it to say I learned more from Pat than any other lawyer I worked with.
Instead, I want to talk about what a fine man Pat is.
I relied on Pat from the time I started working in the Division in 1974. He always patiently answered my questions no matter how stupid they were. He did the same for all the other lawyers who sought him out. And seek him out they did. No matter how busy he was, he would give his time to help the rest of us.
Inclusive- I remember when I first started with the Division and Pat was a Senior Trial Attorney. Every morning he would walk by and ask lawyers, especially the new lawyers if they wanted to go next door for breakfast or for coffee. It made all of us feel we were part of a team working together toward a common goal. Pat really fostered a sense of camaraderie.
As an aside, unfortunately, the only place around that served breakfast was something called the “Kitchateria”. How the Board of Health allowed that place to stay open was always a source of wonderment. But we went with Pat. Not only to learn about our cases, but to learn about each other. He made us feel we were working with top people, and maybe more importantly, that the work we did was important. (Too, we always marveled at how Pat could hold down the “Kitchateria” food.)
Pat was unceasingly fair and loyal. He cared about all of his staff, not just his lawyers. And he cared about them not just professionally but personally. He always stood up for and supported his troops. I remember once he even quit drinking a brand of beer because I had a case (no pun intended) with the Brewery and was always complaining about that piece of litigation. (Of course that I would complain about something was something of a rarity.)
Pat was one of the four Division employees that I worked with who I always thought were irreplaceable—Pat, Steve Csontos, Bob Markham and Tommy Thompson. The rest of us were fungible, but not Pat.
Pat helped me immeasurably when I was the acting AAG. He agreed to serve as my deputy. I knew that being a deputy was not his first choice (or second choice for that matter), and that he really loved being a section chief. He had little interest in the deputy position, else he would have had it years before. Nonetheless, he willingly agreed to help, and as always, his help was superb.
In sum, I owe a debt of deep gratitude for all Pat did for me. But more importantly, the American people owe him a huge debt of gratitude. It is outstanding, selfless and unstinting civil servants like Pat, who make our Government function.
Pat, thank you for all that you have done, and all the best in your new “career”. I hope it lasts as long as last one.
For over half a century Pat has impacted tax procedure because of the large role he has played in shaping the litigation strategies at the Tax Division. The next chief of his section has very large shoes to fill.