For nearly two years, falsehoods about the IRS hiring 87,000 armed agents intent on terrifying taxpayers into compliance have troubled the agency’s leadership, perhaps none more so than Darren Guillot.
“It was a complete lie,” and it worsened the situation on the ground for the thousands of revenue officers working under him, Guillot said.
Guillot oversaw IRS collection until his retirement last September, capping a 36-year career that took him from the front lines of the IRS to the upper ranks of the agency. He said the reality is that the IRS’s tax collectors are real people who take their jobs seriously, yet take no pleasure in taking enforcement actions.
When the IRS’s employees are out in the field, face-to-face with taxpayers in their businesses or homes, “how do you not get to know them in some way?” Guillot continued. “There’s no magic dust that we sprinkled on our employees where they just go out there with blinders on and don’t recognize that these people could be our family members, our neighbors,” he told Tax Notes.
For Guillot, that recognition started early in his career.
A Revelation
On a sweltering Louisiana morning in the summer of 1989, Guillot got his first real glimpse of just how intimidating the IRS can be to people.
“It was very hot,” Guillot recalled. “It was so hot you could see steam coming off the pavement.”
Guillot was a young revenue officer at the time, and that day he was parked across the street from the home of a car dealership owner who had fallen behind on his tax payment plan. He was there to deliver some bad news: The IRS was going to seize some of the dealership’s vehicles.
While sitting in his car in the shade preparing the paperwork, Guillot noticed someone walking toward him from across the street — barefoot, on the scorching pavement. It was the car dealer, emotionally overwhelmed, making a last-ditch plea for mercy.
“That was the first time I’d ever seen a grown man cry,” Guillot said. “He told me if I did a seizure, his employees would leave, that he’d lose his business, that his wife would leave him.”
Guillot reckoned with how his actions might cause the man’s family to split up as he drove home that afternoon. “I'm the guy who loses his wallet and his keys every couple of weeks,” he said. “There's nothing scary about me. But to him, I was the full weight and force of the federal government.”
The interaction got him thinking about how he would leave a business card behind after a field visit to taxpayers who weren’t home or at their office. If that happened on a Friday, they couldn’t contact him until Monday, and many would likely be anxious all weekend, wondering if they were going to lose their house or perhaps even go to jail, Guillot said.
After that, Guillot made it a regular practice to write a friendly note on the back of his business card: “Sorry I missed you. Looking forward to helping you resolve this.”
A decade later, Guillot made a field visit to an elusive, tax-deficient attorney, and he left his business card with his usual note on the back with the attorney’s receptionist. About two weeks passed without any response, and as Guillot was preparing to levy the attorney’s salary, he got an unexpected phone call from the man’s former wife.
“She told me that he didn’t show up for his kid’s stickball game, and that the police were looking to interview me,” Guillot recalled. She went on to recount for him that the police had gone to the man’s apartment and found him dead, laying on his bed with an empty bottle of prescription pills next to him and a suicide note pinned to his shirt that said to make sure Guillot didn’t get the insurance money.
“He put me down by name,” Guillot emphasized. “Every day, I thought about that guy, and I wondered, if I hadn’t had that note on the back of my business card, would I be forever wondering that those kids grew up without a dad because of me?”
“But I did leave a note on that card, and it’s because of that incident in 1989 with that gentleman who woke me up to how scary what the IRS does is to people,” Guillot continued. Those experiences influenced how he interacted with taxpayers out in the field, and later how he trained IRS employees, he told Tax Notes.
Ultimately, the Louisiana car dealer was given a second chance: He followed through on his payment plan, and his business survived with no cars seized by the IRS, according to Guillot.
Guillot Gone
Guillot described how having to personally take countless enforcement actions — including seizing houses, ships, restaurants, and many other types of property — brought him face-to-face with the impact the IRS has on taxpayers, as well as the collateral impact it has on those around them, like their families and employees. “I spent my entire career as a leader making sure that employees understood that it’s not just a folder or a case, it’s somebody’s life,” he said.
Enforcement should always be a last resort, Guillot said. “It takes a thick skin and an even bigger heart to be able to be smart enough to think through and make sure it’s right,” he said.
With his departure, many observers both inside and outside the agency say it has lost a key voice as it considers how to spend billions of dollars on ramped-up enforcement in the years ahead.
With Guillot gone, there are now more “administrators” than “enforcers” among IRS leadership — and that’s a problem, according to a former high-level IRS official. “Enforcers tend to better respect the power of the IRS,” the official said. “They want to be sure enforcement is the last viable option.”
IRS employees on the front lines of enforcement also prefer to have someone over them that has been in their shoes, the official said.
That idea was reiterated by a current IRS revenue officer. “Darren really understood what the field personnel deal with, because he dealt with it,” the officer told Tax Notes. “He was around long enough that he knew the ins and the outs and the ups and downs.”
The Obvious Choice
The first in his family to go to college, Guillot received his bachelor’s degree in biology — a field not typically associated with collecting taxes. “My parents wanted me to be a doctor,” he said. “I wanted to be something else.”
What that “something else” would be still wasn’t clear when Guillot graduated. The federal government was doing a lot of campus recruitment at the time, though, and he was presented with opportunities to work at either the Drug Enforcement Administration or the IRS. Deciding between the two didn’t come down to any compelling list of pros or cons; the IRS just happened to be able to hire him more quickly.
Guillot also admitted that he may have had some family sins to atone for. Family legend has it that his forebear — Capt. Jean Michel Guillot, who led one of the largest militia companies at the battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812 — was also one of the infamous Baratarian pirates, whose chief purpose was to smuggle goods past the United States Revenue Cutter Service.
Guillot said he had no intention of being a taxman for long, but after spending some time on the job, he observed that much of the work involved helping people get themselves out of tough situations. “It truly felt like public service,” he said.
So he stayed. Guillot started at the IRS as a revenue officer collecting tax debts in 1987, and he stuck around for the next 36 years, eventually becoming head of the IRS’s collection operation.
Cleaning Up Shop
Guillot spent his first decade at the IRS as a revenue officer. In 1997 he took a job as an Appeals officer in the IRS Office of Appeals. Then, shortly after the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998 was passed, he became a senior policy analyst, helping draft regulations and later the Internal Revenue Manual entries for collection due process and offers in compromise.
The insider knowledge he developed of the IRS’s procedures helped earn Guillot the widespread respect of those who worked with him, according to R. Damon Rowe of Meadows, Collier, Reed, Cousins, Crouch & Ungerman LLP, who worked under Guillot to set up the IRS’s Office of Fraud Enforcement.
“You could ask him, ‘How did this get started? Why is this like this?’” Rowe said. “He was a history buff — he’d always include a story when he was teaching a lesson.”
A major legacy of Guillot’s time in Appeals is the Appeals Judicial Approach and Culture (AJAC) reform, which, he confirmed, was inspired by the Ajax brand of household cleaning products, to suggest the IRS was cleaning its own house. In 2011, as director of field operations for Appeals, he discovered that some Appeals officers were still doing compliance work.
Appeals officers are only supposed to consider the facts, circumstances, and arguments presented by the taxpayer and the government, but some officers would come across issues or facts that hadn’t come up in the exam or collection stage and then investigate further. “Appeals is, in my opinion, the last, best chance that the IRS has to prove that our tax system is fair,” Guillot said. “And doing that was completely contrary to the mission of Appeals.”
The AJAC project team drafted IRM revisions for each of the IRS divisions to make it clear that Appeals was to be truly independent, and Guillot and his boss then met with each of the IRS division commissioners to get their buy-in on the IRM changes. By mid-2013 — nearly two years after the effort started — the interim guidance reflecting AJAC’s proposed changes went into effect.
Guillot noted that last year marked the 10th anniversary of AJAC. “If there’s anything I did in 36 years there, that was the most important, and that had the most lasting impact affecting every taxpayer who deals with a compliance issue,” he said. “It’s basically IRM policies, but it really keeps Appeals true to what they’ve been doing since 1919.”
AJAC was indeed a game changer, according to Steven N. Klitzner, a Miami-based tax controversy attorney. That project “really transformed Appeals into what it is now, for the better,” he said.
Before AJAC, many Appeals officers were acting like they were revenue officers. In fact, many of them had been hired out of the agency’s exam or collection functions. “Now, they oversee the case and make more of a judicial decision,” Klitzner said. “It really elevated what they do, taking the burden off of them to work files themselves.”
Full Circle
Guillot left Appeals to return to collection in 2013, and by the end of 2014 he was offered what he thought was the “penultimate revenue officer job”: director of field collection, a job he held for the next five years.
Guillot described leading efforts to professionalize the revenue officer role. In the years that he had been away from the collection function, field time by revenue officers had dropped to roughly 13 percent — a stark contrast with his own experience spending 60 to 70 percent of his schedule on field time. Upon his return, he was tasked with boosting field time and getting revenue officers to work more complex cases.
As part of that effort, he brought in specialists from the Justice Department to create training videos — particularly about professional writing skills and fraud detection — which resulted in both more recommended section 7403 lien foreclosure suits and a higher acceptance rate for suit referrals.
With training and complex field work on the rise, Guillot then successfully recommended that the journeyman level for revenue officers be raised from GS-9 to GS-11 on the federal pay scale — a change that had been sought for decades but denied. That helped the IRS overcome a recruiting impediment and made it easier to hire skilled revenue officers.
The result, according to Guillot, was that the IRS was able to hire “sharper and sharper people who came to the job with skills that matched the journey level,” and that eventually contributed to one of his crowning achievements and the final project he helped launch before his retirement: the high-income balance-due initiative that has so far yielded half a billion dollars in revenue collected.
Back to the User Manual
But as all that additional complex work yielded more lien foreclosure suits, concerns about taxpayer rights began to bubble up, including that some of those suits were leaving taxpayers homeless.
Guillot noted that the IRS is prohibited from taking enforcement actions that cause undue hardship, and he described holding meetings with the managers under him to emphasize that they needed to document that their actions wouldn’t do that.
“I got a little bit of pushback, but not much,” Guillot said. However, he recalled that with one group of managers, when he remarked that IRS collection shouldn’t be taking actions that it knew ahead of time would make somebody homeless, one manager responded, “Well, they owe taxes.”
“I was just flabbergasted,” Guillot said, adding that he believes that mentality is extremely rare.
In response, Guillot said he did a deep dive into the IRM, concluded that there was a gap, and oversaw changes to require written statements by revenue officers that they had analyzed the taxpayer’s financial situation and ensured that no undue hardship would result from a seizure or suit to foreclose.
Beyond that, Guillot said he made it a personal mission to impress on his employees how disruptive an IRS investigation is to the lives of taxpayers. He said he held hundreds of “town hall” meetings with revenue officers in field offices around the country during that period, and he made a point at every event of sharing the story of the attorney who committed suicide “so they knew that’s the effect they have on people when they work those cases, and to think about that before they take enforcement action.”
“You can’t put that in the IRM,” Guillot continued. “All you can do is talk to people and leave them feeling something.”
Flipping on Fraud
In August 2019 Guillot accepted the position of deputy commissioner of collection and operations support in SB/SE, which he held until retirement. In that role, he became one of the agency’s most eager adopters of technology.
Over the next few years, Guillot pioneered the agency’s use of QR codes — which former SB/SE Commissioner Eric Hylton once described as a “game changer” — as well as voice bots to help taxpayers set up payment plans. Both of those technologies have since been more broadly adopted across the agency.
Many of those who spoke with Tax Notes about their interactions with Guillot also said he was particularly open-minded.
As deputy commissioner, Guillot was tasked with establishing the Office of Fraud Enforcement (OFE), the successor organization to the National Fraud Program, which had trained teams of employees to serve as fraud advisers. He said initially he wasn’t keen on the idea of a select number of employees acting as fraud advisers; he thought all IRS revenue officers and revenue agents should be trained to recognize and develop fraud cases. So for two years he actively pushed to have the old fraud program and its dedicated team of advisers shut down.
“But I was dead wrong,” Guillot admitted. As he set about establishing the OFE, he held town hall meetings with IRS employees, heard their generally positive experiences with the fraud referral program, and ultimately found himself convinced. He added that he even signed off on making the fraud advisers permanent positions instead of temporary before he left the agency.
“He liked diversity of thought. That sounds easy, but it’s not,” said Rowe, who served as head of the OFE under Guillot. “Sometimes people get stuck in their ways, but a good leader expands his mind continuously. Darren was able to do that very well.”
Rowe recalled that Guillot was also instrumental in supporting the OFE’s work to use software and data analytics to improve case selection and to, for example, try to identify and stop fraudulent Paycheck Protection Program loan payments before they were issued.
One of Us
Guillot’s frontline experiences didn’t end when he moved into the more senior positions in IRS collection. He kept his pocket credentials — used to identify himself to taxpayers — throughout his career at the agency.
During his tenure as director of field operations in collection, Guillot said he tagged along on at least 111 field visits to taxpayers, and he continued to do so as deputy commissioner. Anytime he visited a field office, he said he’d spend the day in the field working cases with a revenue officer.
Guillot said the practice kept him connected to the work done by his employees, their experiences, and their challenges. “I wanted the employees to know I was one of them,” he said.
That kind of hands-on approach didn’t go unnoticed. The current IRS revenue officer said it communicated that Guillot was committed to staying plugged in to what was happening out in the field. Other lower-level managers did that, too, but for someone at Guillot’s level of seniority to do so was unusual, he said. “That meant a lot,” the revenue officer added.
The ongoing frontline experiences also kept him informed on how the job had changed over the years. Guillot concluded that the fundamental reasons for taxpayer noncompliance hadn’t changed since he’d first started, and that face-to-face contact with taxpayers was still the most effective means of ensuring both short- and long-term compliance. But the technology and tools available to the IRS to locate individuals or identify fraud is now “light-years ahead,” which Guillot said helped him understand the need for the IRS to add those tools to its repertoire.
“It gives you the background to speak from, so you’re not just guessing,” Rowe said of Guillot’s boots-on-the-ground approach. He likened it to his experience in law school: Some professors were purely academic, while others had firsthand experience practicing law and could bring real-life examples into the discussion. “That was more important to me, to know that it wasn’t just an exercise on the chalkboard,” Rowe said.
For someone in the kinds of leadership positions that Guillot held, it’s “imperative that they have that history and background,” Rowe added.
Left Behind
Guillot left his mark on the IRS, but even his top achievements arguably left work undone.
A 2022 Taxpayer Advocate Service report concluded that Appeals still had its work cut out for it to fully convince observers of its independence, even after the AJAC reforms. The report noted that many Appeals officers share a workspace with other IRS personnel and that Appeals officers get their technical advice from IRS counsel, which can create an “institutional comfort” that “can unintentionally put taxpayers at a disadvantage and negatively impact the appearance of objectivity.” In many cases, the Appeals officer also has prior working relationships with revenue officers and IRS counsel.
“Such a relationship and all such appearances greatly impede the fact and appearance of independence,” TAS warned.
Earlier this year, TAS also found the effect of the IRM changes Guillot oversaw in response to concerns about section 7403 lien foreclosure suit referrals to be insufficient, describing them as “simply a set of instructions to staff.” Updating the IRM was a step in the right direction, but those taxpayer protections need to be codified by Congress, according to TAS.
Asked if his absence would create a vacuum in the IRS leadership structure, Guillot said that he could think of dozens of leaders in collection ready to step into his shoes. “I think it’ll be fine,” he said.
Rowe agreed — to an extent. He suggested that because Guillot had accumulated so much experience and held his top role as long as he did, it would take time for someone else to gain the kind of voice within the IRS that he had. “I think they’ll be able to function, but if you sat down with Darren, you’d know he’s a different kind of guy,” he said.
However, the current revenue officer was less bullish, noting that Guillot’s position has now been assumed by SB/SE Deputy Commissioner Maha Williams, a former revenue agent who previously oversaw the exam function. “It doesn’t make sense to me to have an exam person in charge of collection,” the revenue officer said.
And while some may argue that IRS executives are interchangeable, the revenue officer didn’t agree. “It’s important to have executives that have that frontline experience, so they understand when you make a policy change how it’s going to impact the people out knocking on doors,” they said.
‘No Regrets’
Shortly after he left the IRS, Guillot joined Alliantgroup, where he works as a national director. He admitted that things get done far faster in the private sector compared with his experience in government, but when asked if he has any regrets about spending the bulk of his career in public service, he replied with a personal story.
When he was still in the pre-med program in college, his school required him to do a period of community service. He ended up at the Tulane University Hospital, and he spent his Thursday nights working in the cystic fibrosis unit, where he would typically spend his time playing with the children who had hoses connected to their lungs that pushed in steam and pumped out mucus. One evening, he asked the doctor of the ward how long those kids could expect to live and learned that they would, at best, make it to age 15. “I remember thinking, ‘Man, I sure hope that’ll never be me,’” he said.
More than two decades later, Guillot found himself with a daughter who had cystic fibrosis. He soon learned that in 1990 the National Institutes of Health was given funding to do a gene research project and to develop medicines for rare genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis, which has led to vast improvements in therapies over the years.
“Every time I thought I was having a bad day, I thought, ‘You know what, what I do here is raising money for new medicines and keeping my daughter alive,’” Guillot said. “Now my daughter is 37; she’s healthy, and she’s getting married in April.”
“So, 100,000,000 percent, no regrets,” Guillot said.