Ira Weiss specializes in tax strategy, financial accounting, mutual fund taxation, and private equity investing. He teaches advanced MBA courses in both tax strategy and entrepreneurship at Chicago Booth, and helps support the entrepreneurial community through his work as the Faculty Director of Hyde Park Angels, an angel investing group affiliated with the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship.
Weiss has been the recipient of numerous teaching awards, and his research has appeared in the Wall Street Journal and on CNN, as well as in the Journal of Accounting and Economicsand Review of Accounting Studies.
Weiss feels it is important for students in his tax class to walk away knowing how to structure business decisions in the most tax-efficient manner, taking into account all other costs. He cites one significant use for the tools he teaches in class: learning how to structure merger and acquisition transactions. Students also learn many useful tax planning techniques for their personal financial decisions, such as whether they can deduct the cost of MBA tuition off their taxes. While teaching taxes and business strategy, he often is able to include some of the structures from real private equity deals to demonstrate the power of effective tax planning.
Weiss has held positions at the accounting/consulting firms of Ernst & Young and Coopers & Lybrand, and serves on the boards of Concerro and Retel Technologies.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Illinois in 1992. He received an MBA in 1999 and a PhD in 2001, from the Chicago Booth. He holds a CPA from the state of Illinois.
Outside of the classroom, he enjoys college basketball, mountain biking, Middle East politics and religions, and neuro-linguistic programming.