James Toups

James is the firm’s U.S. Tax Energy & Chemicals sector leader and also serves as the Business Tax Services Office Leader for Houston and New Orleans. Based in the firm’s Oil & Gas Center of Excellence located in Houston, Texas, he is responsible for the coordination and leadership of Deloitte Tax’s oil and gas industry team, which is the largest in the industry. James is an accomplished senior-level energy executive with over 30 years of progressive experience in tax, finance, administration and risk management activities, including development of tax, financial and operational strategies, metrics tied to those strategies and ongoing development and monitoring of control systems designed to preserve company assets and report accurate financial results.

Before joining Deloitte in June of 2018, James spent three years as Vice President of Tax with Devon Energy Corporation, a large-cap North American independent exploration and production company with activities in the U.S. and Canada. Before that he spent twelve years with Apache Corporation, another large-cap North America independent exploration and production company with operations in the U.S., Canada, Argentina, the UK North Sea, Australia, Egypt and China. James held numerous roles including Tax Director, Chief of Staff – Finance, Managing Director Finance (“Regional CFO”) for Apache’s Canadian operations, and Director of Risk Management. During this time he spearheaded multi-jurisdictional teams of tax and finance professionals, securing billions in tax savings, as well as overseeing audit preparation and defense. James also restructured multiple departments by redeploying personnel to high-value added activities by improving existing processes and procedures and implementing leading-edge technology, resulting in millions in overhead savings.

Prior to his fifteen years in industry, James spent eight years in public accounting serving clients in the upstream, midstream and downstream sectors of the energy industry.