Few areas of business finance are as easily overlooked as the tax applied to everyday purchases. Yet as companies adopt new technologies and enter unfamiliar markets, keeping up with the rules has become increasingly complex. Sales and use tax is a clear example. It touches nearly every transaction, and in capital-intensive sectors such as energy, small misjudgments can grow into substantial costs that remain buried until someone takes a closer look.

Gina Pizzo, Managing Director at Alvarez & Marsal Holdings, has spent more than two decades helping clients uncover this exposure. Her practical, relationship-led approach offers a clear perspective on where the profession is heading. For her, the work goes beyond identifying tax exposure; it is about understanding how those findings fit within the wider business and the decisions leaders need to make.

Let’s explore how Gina’s experience and leadership are shaping her approach to tax and the future of the profession!

A Career Built on Relationships

Like most people in the profession, Gina fell into sales and use tax rather than setting out to specialize in it, since it’s rarely something covered in a college curriculum. What has kept her engaged for more than two decades is the opportunity to work alongside people across finance, operations, and leadership.

Sales and use tax touches nearly every transaction a business makes, creating opportunities to understand different functions and business priorities. For her, those relationships, many of which have lasted the better part of her career, are what make the work meaningful day to day.

Her broad experience has also kept the work from becoming monotonous. Having worked across multiple states and industries, from utilities and pipelines to refining and exploration, she has continuously expanded her knowledge base in a way that working in a single niche never could. Focusing purely on sales tax consulting, rather than narrowing into one industry, has required her to evolve constantly and stay current on whatever the latest trend happens to be, from data centers and AI to digital services.

Seeing Beyond the Tax Issue

Working with energy companies has given Gina a close view of the challenges that arise in highly capital-intensive businesses. One of the most common issues she sees is the application of manufacturing exemptions, and more specifically, what qualifies as direct use in manufacturing.

Because energy companies make massive investments in equipment, refining processes, and production infrastructure, there is almost always an opportunity to review historical purchases and uncover exemptions that were missed. Even when companies assume they’re already claiming everything available to them, Gina and her teams frequently find substantial overpayments sitting in periods still open under the statute of limitations.

Performing detailed reviews of those periods, identifying what qualifies as direct use in manufacturing under state law, and pursuing refunds can help energy clients recover meaningful cash back to the business, rather than simply fixing exposure going forward.

At the same time, she believes technical expertise must always be balanced with a clear understanding of the client’s wider objectives. “You can’t jump over nickels to pick up pennies,” she tells her team, reinforcing the importance of seeing tax as part of a much larger strategy.

Sometimes the best tax strategy on paper doesn’t make sense operationally. If a leader becomes too focused on the technical win, it becomes easy to lose sight of what the client actually needs. For her, avoiding that tunnel vision is essential to being a trusted advisor rather than just a technical resource. Clients come back when they know you understand their business first and their tax exposure second.

Leading by Example

Gina’s leadership philosophy comes down to leading by example. She tries never to ask anyone on her team to do something she wouldn’t be willing to do herself, whether that’s the long hours during a tight deadline or the less glamorous parts of a project.

However, her leadership approach has evolved with experience. Early in her career, the focus was easy to place purely on getting the work done. Over time, she learned that understanding what’s happening in someone’s life, what’s motivating them, and what they need to succeed makes for a stronger team and, frankly, better work.

That shift toward empathy has become an important part of how she leads, particularly during difficult periods. One of the most challenging moments in her career came when her biggest advocate retired, followed shortly after by two senior directors leaving the practice. The situation forced a real reset.

She had to refocus the team, make sure people felt engaged and bought into where they were headed, and become visible in a way she hadn’t needed to be before. She rolled up her sleeves and made sure everyone on the team felt heard, supported, and confident in the direction they were taking the practice.

It was a hard stretch for her, but it taught her that “Leadership isn’t really tested when things are going well. It’s tested when the people you relied on are suddenly gone and the team is looking to you to figure out what comes next.”

Bringing Perspective to Every Transaction

Gina’s role also extends into the Global Tax Transaction practice, where she collaborates on M&A and private-equity transactions. Here, sales and use tax exposure can become particularly important because much of it can remain invisible until someone goes looking for it.

On the sell side, the role is to minimize the risk of a decrease in value tied to sales and use tax exposure before a company changes hands. On the buy side, it is about making sure clients are protected from successor liability and that indemnification provisions actually cover what they need to cover.

Whichever side of the deal a client is on, identifying and appropriately allocating that exposure before closing is one of the most valuable contributions she brings to the table. Her approach continues to connect technical knowledge with the practical realities of the business.

Preparing for an AI-Driven Future

Technology is also changing the profession. For Gina, “The adoption of AI has been the single most disruptive development of my career.”

There is a real rush across the profession to incorporate technology tools that allow teams to operate more efficiently, and she sees that shift as overdue in many ways. But she also believes technology has to be balanced against keeping humans in the loop on review and against a real risk to how younger professionals develop.

Sales and use tax has historically relied on an apprenticeship model, where junior staff learn by working alongside more experienced people. As the profession leans further into automation, she believes firms have to be deliberate about still training the next generation the way they were trained, rather than relying on technology to do the thinking for them.

Her experience across industries has prepared her for this kind of constant change. The analytical framework may remain consistent, but the business models, technologies, and trends requiring that framework continue to evolve.

Creating Space for Women to Advance

For Gina, leadership also carries a responsibility to create stronger pathways for women. As the former chair of A&M’s Women’s Leadership Connection, she cares deeply about the infrastructure needed to help women stay and advance in complex industries.

Her message to young women is direct: “Believe you are meant to be in every room you’re in. Speak with confidence and demand the respect you’ve earned.”

But mindset alone is not enough. Networks such as WLC provide women with visibility, sponsorship, and a peer group they can be candid with. For her, retention is the bigger issue. Too many talented women leave when they reach major life changes, having kids being the most common one, not because of a lack of ambition, but because the profession’s traditional model doesn’t always flex around what that season of life requires.

Firms that want to retain and advance women, she believes, need real flexibility built into career progression, not just policies on paper. Advancement also requires those already in leadership to sponsor the women coming behind them, not simply mentor them. “Mentorship gives advice. Sponsorship puts your own credibility behind someone and opens doors they can’t open yet.”

Someone did that for her, and she credits it as a major reason she’s stayed at Alvarez & Marsal Tax for almost two decades.

Looking Ahead with Purpose

Gina’s professional contributions have been recognized through her inclusion in Women We Admire’s Top 50 Women Leaders of Houston in 2025. She is also a frequent speaker at IPT, TEI, ETA, and COST, including presenting at the IPT Sales Tax Symposium & Annual Conference. She holds the CMI designation through the Institute for Professionals in Taxation and earned both her bachelor’s degree in marketing and master’s degree in finance from Louisiana State University.

Beyond the office, she enjoys traveling with her daughter Destiny, while running and staying focused on overall health and wellness round out her life. Her LSU pride remains just as strong, alongside her loyalty as a die-hard Saints and LSU Tigers fan.

Across more than two decades, her career has remained grounded in relationships, technical knowledge, empathy, and a willingness to keep learning. Whether advising energy companies, supporting major transactions, leading teams through uncertainty, or helping women build lasting careers, her approach remains centered on understanding people and the businesses behind the tax issues.