Arthur J. Dixon Memorial and Jonathan Horn Distinguished Service awards

James W. Sansone, CPA, received the 2024 Arthur J. Dixon Memorial Award, the highest honor given by the accounting profession for contributions to the field of taxation. The award by the AICPA’s Tax Division was presented Nov. 13 at the AICPA Fall Tax Division Meeting in Washington, D.C., by Blake Vickers, CPA, CGMA, chair of the AICPA Tax Executive Committee (TEC) and vice president, Tax and Treasury, at Alamo Group Inc.

At the same meeting, Annette Nellen, Esq., CPA, CGMA, received the 2024 Jonathan Horn Distinguished Service Award. Sansone is senior director in the Tax Quality and Risk Management group of RSM’s National Office of Risk Management in Chicago. As a longtime Tax Division volunteer, he has served on 10 committees and task forces over more than 40 years. He is a current member and past chair of the AICPA Tax Practice Responsibilities Committee. Sansone has also served on the TEC and chaired the S Corporation Taxation Committee. He has chaired the Statements on Standards for Tax Services Task Force and the E-Signatures Task Force. He has written articles in the Journal of Accountancy and The Tax Adviser, for the latter of which he is the contributing editor of the Tax Practice Responsibilities column. He is a frequent speaker on tax ethics and policy.

“Jim has performed 44 years of AICPA Tax Division services, over 36 years from 1988 continuously, including this current year and, hopefully, many more years to come,” Vickers said during the presentation, detailing some of Sansone’s roles. “Jim has had wide influence in the tax profession.”

The award was established in 1982 in memory of Arthur J. Dixon, who chaired the TEC from 1977 to 1980. It is given for distinguished service in the area of taxation in the spirit of Dixon’s professionalism.

Jonathan Horn Distinguished Service Award

Nellen, recipient of the Jonathan Horn Distinguished Service Award and a past winner of the Arthur J. Dixon Memorial Award, is a professor and MST Program Director at San José State University. In the past year alone, Nellen has chaired the Digital Assets Tax Task Force and served on the Disaster Tax Relief Task Force, the State and Local Tax (SALT) Deduction PTET Task Force, and the State Tax Guidance on Digital Assets Working Group of the SALT Technical Resource Panel. Beyond the AICPA and higher education, Nellen also is the 2024 chair of the IRS Advisory Council. She also has received the AICPA Sid Kess Award for Excellence in Continuing Education. For more than 20 years, Nellen has been the contributing editor of The Tax Adviser’s Campus to Clients column, highlighting practical and innovative approaches in tax education.

The Jonathan Horn Distinguished Service Award is given for outstanding contributions to the Tax Division in the past year. It posthumously commemorates Jonathan Horn, CPA, who was a longtime Tax Division volunteer and recipient of the Distinguished Service Award and subsequently an AICPA staff member.