About the President

Robert Firestone is President of the NYC Tax Commission and continues his service as a Commissioner on the NYC Tax Appeals Tribunal.

President Firestone was appointed a Commissioner on the Tax Appeals Tribunal in 2006, where he has served on an appellate panel of three Commissioners hearing and deciding appeals from administrative law judge determinations in tax cases under the City’s business income and non-property excise taxes. During that same 18-year period, he also conducted hearings on over 26,000 applications for the NYC Tax Commission reviewing property tax assessments set by the NYC Department of Finance.

President Firestone has over 44 years of experience in state and city tax matters, including 13 years with the NYC Law Department where he supervised the City’s income and excise tax litigation before the Tax Appeals Tribunal, State and Federal Courts, litigating and arguing the most precedentially significant cases, supervised federal, State and City tax advice to City agencies, and reviewed and drafted tax legislation. He was also a tax associate at Sullivan & Cromwell and has been an adjunct professor at New York Law School for over 20 years, where he teaches state & local taxation.  He holds a JD from New York Law School (Summa Cum Laude), an LLM in Taxation from NYU School of Law, and a B.S. in Accounting from Brooklyn College.