No. 1: Ralph Albert Thomas

As chief executive officer/executive director of the NJ Society of CPAs, Thomas is the face of the accounting business in the state. The trade group represents 14,000 certified public accountants, and Thomas has been a key voice for the needs of businesses and the professionals who do work for them. In April, Thomas was particularly vocal about pushing the state’s income and corporate business tax filing deadlines from April 15 to July 15, to match the same move at the federal level.

“It is impractical, if not impossible, for taxpayers and their advisers to operate under different sets of deadlines for federal and state filings, and no one’s life should be risked to meet tax filing obligations,” he said.

Complex tax legislation that will profoundly affect businesses — from obscure budget language, to the 2017 federal tax cuts, to the federal COVID-19 relief aid — have all been broken down and analyzed by NJCPA under Thomas’s watch.

With the state Legislature and Murphy administration planning to borrow nearly $10 billion to plug gaping holes in the state’s budget left by the COVID-19 pandemic, Thomas is bound to be a major, oft-cited voice in the public debate.

And with talks of tax increases, or “revenue raisers” as Murphy calls them, organizations like NJCPA could be among the first to flag those revenue generating ideas in budget proposals that will likely run hundreds of pages long. Thomas’s voice will only grow in importance.