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Learning From History: Tax Analysts at Middle Age

Posted on Sep. 21, 2020

To celebrate our 50th anniversary, Tax Analysts is publishing an occasional series of articles looking back at the organization's history — from reflections on the individuals who built the company, to insider looks at how we operate today and visions for our path forward.

In this article, Joseph J. Thorndike takes stock of Tax Analysts over the decades -- how the company's goals and identity have evolved, how they have stayed constant, and what the organization has achieved.

Joseph J. Thorndike
Joseph J. Thorndike

Tax Analysts and I reached middle age together. Well, to be honest, I got here first, if only by a few years. Presumably, organizations are less prone to existential crises than individuals, since they face no biological certainty that time is likely to run out somewhat sooner than later.

Still, it seems reasonable that organizations might pause to take stock as they round the half-century mark. Many of the same questions present themselves: What have we done with these several decades? Have we accomplished what we set out to achieve? Have our goals evolved? Can we claim the mantle of success? Are we a disappointment?

Of course, organizations (like corporations) are only notional “persons,” so they can’t really take stock of themselves. It falls to actual persons — and historians in particular — to make the assessments. So here goes.

Two Goals, Two Organizations

When Thomas F. Field founded Tax Analysts in 1970, he had two goals in mind. First, he hoped to represent the public interest in a legislative arena shot through with special interest lobbying. Second, he hoped to educate lawmakers, journalists, and the general public about broadly accepted principles of sound tax policy.

These goals were related but distinct, and Field decided he needed two separate organizations. As a result, on Bastille Day 1970, he founded both Tax Analysts and Advocates (TAA), a 501(c)(3) charitable and educational organization, and Taxation With Representation (TWR), a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization.

TAA took on the educational part of Field’s original mission, focusing on journalists. During the five years he spent working in the Treasury Office of Tax Legislative Counsel, Field had come to the realization that reporters — even those covering business — were “often largely unaware of the intricacies of the tax system.”

Meanwhile, TWR would spend its time trying to reshape the tax law. Field’s time at Treasury left him disappointed in the way tax law was drafted. “The whole legislative process was dominated by special interest groups urging narrowly focused measures designed to confer tax benefits on the few at the expense of the many,” he later recalled. “Perhaps, I thought, a group could be formed to represent the general taxpaying public in Congress and to combat special interest tax giveaways.” TWR pursued that goal by organizing panels for congressional hearings and compiling expert research for interested lawmakers.

The institutional bifurcation of the early Tax Analysts survived for about a decade. By the late 1970s, however, TAA had absorbed almost all of TWR’s functions, save its direct lobbying. By 1980, Tax Analysts had emerged in more or less its current form.

Did the change in organization mark a change in goals? Was the new Tax Analysts fundamentally different than the old TAA/TWR?

Not really.

Two Goals, One Organization

To accurately take stock of Tax Analysts’ development over its first half-century, it’s best to use Field’s original goals as a starting point rather than a complete and comprehensive yardstick for evaluation. The reason is itself historical. Field’s recollection of his thoughts in 1970 can help explain the first few years of Tax Analysts’ existence. But it doesn’t shed much light on the initial, swift redefinition of these goals in the organization’s first decade of existence. This redefinition helps explain the institutional consolidation that occurred simultaneously — as well as the next 40 years of Tax Analysts’ existence.

Perhaps even more important, Field’s original goals, both educational and legislative, implied a broader, more fundamental hope: He wanted to encourage the development of a fairer, simpler, more efficient federal tax system. This broader mission was not especially ideological, but neither was it entirely devoid of ideology. It was bound tightly to the postwar notion of comprehensive tax reform in the model advanced by experts like Stanley Surrey, Joseph Pechman, and Carl Shoup (to name a not-quite-random trio of luminaries). They were hardly partisans, but they shared a faith in the modern income tax, both individual and corporate. They believed in limiting tax preferences, broadening the tax base, and keeping rates moderate.

Again, this agenda was not partisan. Indeed, it had significant bipartisan appeal, at least until the 1990s. It was also deeply technocratic, rooted in a faith that solid research and dispassionate analysis would yield a better tax system — if only lawmakers could be made to listen.

With his pair of new organizations, Field hoped to raise the volume for those distracted lawmakers (and the journalists who informed them). In practical terms, he spent a lot of time marshaling and repackaging expert analysis. But the bipartisan nature of the postwar tax reform movement made that effort somewhat complicated. “TWR did not insist on a single point of view when it assembled panels to offer congressional testimony or invited scholars to contribute to monographs,” Field recalled. “This sometimes confused members of Congress, who asked where TWR stood on a particular subject.”

Washington depends on ideology to organize itself. When groups don’t fit neatly on the spectrum from left to right, lawmakers can find it hard to make sense of them — or their ideas. That began to happen with TWR.

Meanwhile, Field’s second organization, TAA, had stumbled into a new line of business. Two lines, actually. As a means of educating journalists, TAA launched Tax Notes, a weekly publication recapping developments in Congress, the Treasury, and the IRS. Increasingly, the magazine was publishing material written not just by TAA staffers, but also by outside authors who wished to reach a well-connected, sophisticated audience of tax practitioners and policymakers.

TAA also initiated a series of lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act seeking access to private letter rulings and technical advice memoranda, arguing that they constituted a body of working law the IRS had a responsibility to disclose. TAA won the initial suit in 1973, as well as several follow-up suits in subsequent years. Increasingly, TAA came to view this sort of disclosure litigation as a core element of its public interest mission.

TAA’s new activities were complementary. Tax Notes was proving itself a successful vehicle for distributing high-quality information about the tax system — serving the principal goal of technocratic tax reformers everywhere. At the same time, transparency litigation was bolstering the free flow of information Field believed was crucial to the long-term development of better fiscal systems. TAA’s growing publication program also provided an outlet for the documents produced by that disclosure litigation.

By the late 1970s, Field realized that TAA and TWR might reasonably be consolidated into a single organization. Given the nature of TWR’s non-ideological lobbying, the two weren’t really engaged in different sorts of activities. “TWR, in its information-providing role, was not doing anything that could not be legally done by TAA,” Field recalled later. “Indeed, TAA’s special reports in Tax Notes magazine very much resembled the published expert testimony submitted to Congress by TWR’s panels.”

By 1980 TWR was gone. The proximate cause of death was financial, but as Field himself recognized, the more serious ailment was a lack of specific purpose. TWR had simply been absorbed by the educational mission of TAA — which in 1981 dropped the last two words of its name and became simply Tax Analysts.

Taking Stock

So, where does this capsule history of goals and missions leave us? Has Tax Analysts made good on the hopes that a 39-year-old Tom Field sketched out during the summer of 1970? Can it be judged a success?

Those questions aren’t quite the same, so let’s start with the first: Field’s original goals. The first of Tax Analysts’ two predecessor organizations, TAA, was charged with educating journalists, policymakers, and the general public about tax policy. Over time, that goal expanded to include transparency litigation, but the overarching mission remained the same: to provide clear, honest, expert information about tax policy to anyone and everyone who might be willing to listen. For the most part, TAA and, later, Tax Analysts have pursued that mission through an expansive collection of publications.

From the start, those publications have been journalistic rather than political, which is to say they have been driven by a desire to impart information rather than to advance a particular agenda. As noted above, the publications haven’t been perfectly descriptive; a careful reader will detect a normative preference for traditional, base-broadening, rate-reducing tax reform. But even that normative bias hasn’t been unchallenged in the pages of Tax Notes and its sister publications, all of which have made room for alternative visions of what constitutes tax reform.

Indeed, almost from the start, Tax Analysts has conceived its educational mission less in terms of specific legislative reforms and more in terms of vibrant debate. What Field wrote of TWR and its lobbying activities was actually a good description of the Tax Analysts publishing ethos: “presenting a variety of differing points of view better represented the public interest than did selecting a single point of view and insisting on its correctness.”

Conceived in these terms, Tax Analysts has been a clear success in meeting its original educational goals.

The second of Field’s original goals — speaking for the public interest in a legislative process dominated by special interests — has also been realized through this reconceptualized educational mission. Over the course of the 1970s, Field himself had come to believe that the best sort of public interest lobbying involved the evenhanded provision of differing points of view about tax policy. And as he realized by 1980, that sort of information provision could be better, or at least more sustainably, achieved through publication rather than direct lobbying activities.

In that sense, I think it’s fair to judge Tax Analysts a success on this second metric as well. The organization may no longer speak directly to lawmakers about tax reform, but it speaks for the public through its publications in much the same way that it once spoke through its lobbying efforts: by marshaling the disparate opinions of acknowledged experts with differing points of view.

Tax Analysts speaks for the public by providing a forum for the public to speak for itself.

Finally, it seems fair to step back and assess Tax Analysts according to the most demanding metric of all: the effort to encourage the creation of tax systems that are fairer, simpler, and more economically efficient. Has Tax Analysts succeeded in that daunting mission?

The answer to that question is inherently political. Everyone wants a tax system that’s fair, simple, and efficient, but agreement on what those terms mean — and how they should relate to one another — is stubbornly elusive. And if history is any guide, it’s likely to remain that way.

Which is why it makes sense, at least for an education-minded organization like Tax Analysts, to focus less on results and more on process. While holding to our faith that the tax system can be made better, we can remain agnostic about precisely how it might be improved.

Instead, we can cling tenaciously to Field’s original and most important insight: The surest route to better tax policy is through the unfettered exchange of ideas and information about tax policy.

And judged by that standard, Tax Analysts can be very proud indeed of its first 50 years.

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