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Interview: A Conversation With Former National Taxpayer Advocate

Posted on Jan. 31, 2020

Nina Olson, who retired as the National Taxpayer Advocate six months ago, talks with Tax Notes Today senior reporter William Hoffman about her new nonprofit, the need for a permanent successor, and her ongoing fight for taxpayer rights.

Read the podcast transcript below. This post has been edited for length and clarity. Due to the length of this recording, the audio has been divided into two parts. Find part two below.

William Hoffman: Welcome Nina Olson, former National Taxpayer Advocate at the IRS. Thank you for joining us.

Nina Olson: Thank you for inviting me.

William Hoffman: Just getting right to it. You are now the executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights.  

Nina Olson: That's correct.  

William Hoffman: Tell us a little bit about that now.

Nina Olson: The Center for Taxpayer Rights is a nonprofit that I founded and started working on on August 1, the day after I retired from the IRS. It is a nonprofit that is set up to further taxpayer rights in the United States and around the world, and we have several initiatives going on. One of them is the International Conference on Taxpayer Rights, which the Taxpayer Advocate Service formerly sponsored, but we have taken over. We are busy planning the fifth international conference, which is going to be September 30-October 1, 2020, at the University of Pretoria in Johannesburg. That's taking up a lot of planning activity.  

We have established a low-income taxpayer clinic support center with an advisory board made of clinics around the U.S. to try to identify the needs of the clinics and try to create some additional sources of funding, not just the IRS. We might do some umbrella grants where multiple clinics can combine to work on issues of interest to them, particularly vulnerable populations, rural clinics, things like that. We're also working with other countries. Australia has about 12 clinics now. I had worked with Australia in the past, and I'm going over in the spring to work with them and meet with the Australia tax office on what they're doing. Some other countries are interested in clinics, so that's neat.  

Then we're working with taxpayer advocate offices and inspector generals around the world who do a similar function to the taxpayer advocate. Just this week I had a call with someone at the Federation of Tax Administrators to talk about maybe doing some web conferences with state or local taxpayer advocates in the state tax agencies to see what we can do in terms of strengthening those offices. 

The last thing is to really work on a project to educate taxpayers, particularly in the U.S., about what the tax system does. To that end, I've been talking both to Tax Analysts and others and building on top of some initiatives that others have done. We hope to adopt a school district in the country and create an advisory board of educators and those that have an interest in tax and those that have an interest in education. We would pick some parts of the curriculum to insert tax topics. I really see it as creative project. It could be creating video games. I really want to see a graphic novel or a comic book about stories about tax and weave it into other ways whether it's history or economics or just stories about how tax touches lives.  

William Hoffman: It sounds like a heck of a lot of work. You're not doing it all by yourself.

Nina Olson: I have a great board of directors. A small board of directors.

William Hoffman: Anyone you can point out who our community might recognize?

Nina Olson: Yeah, everybody. T. Keith Fogg from Harvard University is the president of the board. Leslie Book from Villanova University, Alice G. Abreu from Temple University, and Liz Atkinson, who is in private practice. She had been on the board of the Community Tax Law Project and is an active person in low-income taxpayer issues as well as an excellent controversy lawyer. She's our secretary and I'm the treasurer. At this point, no one's being paid anything. This is all volunteer work.

William Hoffman: Where do you plan the funding to come from?

Nina Olson: The funding has come from contributions. The conference funding is coming from a number of sources, and some of them are international like the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation. The host entity, the University of Pretoria African Tax Institute, is funding a lot of the expenses like providing the venue, the reception area, buses, etc. 

William Hoffman: What about for the center itself?

Nina Olson: We have a grant out right now that we're waiting on the response.

William Hoffman: This is to a private organization?

Nina Olson: No, we have a grant to the American Bar Association. It's an opportunity endowment grant to create a nationwide pro bono referral panel for the clinics. There are many small clinics or clinics in rural areas that don't have tax lawyers and they aren't able to raise matching funds for the IRS grant program because that's a dollar-for-dollar match. Even though in-kind contributions like donated time can count, unless you don't have attorneys to donate the time. The idea is to get a nationwide panel where people will volunteer to take cases from them. We have a grant out for that. We should hear February 1 about that.

I'm also working on a series of grants of foundations to fund the education component. I'm comfortable volunteering for a while and investing my human capital into the entity. I have the perspective of someone who created a nonprofit before: the Community Tax Law Project. It had no funding for the first four years of its existence, except for me donating my time and the office space. Over time it got attention and it got grants, and now it is enormously successful. 

You never know where this stuff leads, and I'm willing to invest my time. I would love more contributions, but I'm also very serious about reaching out to foundations and just asking for meetings. Not an ask, but asking for meetings to educate them about why they should care about this issue and then make the ask.  

William Hoffman: It has now been how many months since we've had a permanent national taxpayer advocate?   

Nina Olson: Six months almost.

William Hoffman: Why is the post still vacant?

Nina Olson: I have no idea. I have a year ban for communicating officially with the IRS. I have been enjoying not having communications with the IRS after 18 years of having communications every day. I don't know why. I felt that when I walked out the door we had several good candidates that had already gone through a very rigorous process and interviews. Any one of them I would have been comfortable with. That was why I announced my retirement on March 1, a full five months before I was leaving, to give the Treasury secretary time to make a selection.

Unlike other positions that are, for example, vacant right now that require Senate confirmation, the statute says very clearly that you can cut through all of the procedural requirements of the civil service or other appointments. The secretary can just appoint the national taxpayer advocate. That is the hiring authority in section 7803(c). There is a legal opinion to that point from the Office of General Counsel from when I was hired back in 2001. The secretary just needs to appoint the person and sign a document that appoints the person. Obviously, the person would go through a background check, but that doesn't take very long at all. I do not know why there is no one selected.  

William Hoffman: Does it surprise you?

Nina Olson: Yes. It does surprise me that it's gone on that long.

William Hoffman: I've talked with a number of people who've worked around the national taxpayer advocate and TAS. I understand the moral and ethical argument why you have to have a national taxpayer advocate. What is it that a permanent taxpayer advocate can do that an acting national taxpayer advocate cannot do?

Nina Olson: By definition, the acting taxpayer advocate is an IRS employees that has a future in the IRS. No matter how stellar that person is, that person has to think about his or her career. That is precisely the thing that Congress did in 1998. They had a taxpayer advocate who was a career IRS employee. Over the last couple of weeks, I've gone back and read the 1997 hearings before the Ways and Means Committee. I was at one of them. I was at the one when the then taxpayer advocate was severely criticized by the Oversight Subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee for not doing enough and being beholden to the IRS. I've re-read the record yet again of the Senate Finance Committee hearings in which I also testified. It's very clear what comes out from those hearings is that they wanted someone profoundly independent. That was also the recommendation of the Restructuring Commission that heard from a problem resolution officer who had been reprimanded because of her advocacy by the regional commissioner of the IRS.  

With that evidentiary record and the past performance of the advocates, they felt that bringing someone in who had the experience of, and this is what the statute requires, representing taxpayers. Not just any taxpayer, individual taxpayers. That is what the statute says. The position also requires a customer service background dealing with people. There's the two-year prohibition for not working for the IRS before and a five-year prohibition rule afterwards so that you have no career path in the IRS. It sets up an infrastructure that creates that independence. The independence of the person at the top gives cover to everyone who reports to that person.  

That's the other major change that 1998 made. Instead of the problem resolution officers and the employees who worked in problem resolution reporting to the district directors or the regional commissioners, they report, by law, to the national taxpayer advocate and the local taxpayer advocate offices. By law, the national taxpayer advocate makes all personnel decisions, including hiring and firing. Not the IRS, the national taxpayer advocate. The national taxpayer advocate, with his or her independence, gives the cover to those local offices to do the kind of advocacy that Congress was trying to get since 1986 when it created the Taxpayer Ombudsman office and finally got it 12 years later in 1998.

William Hoffman: Given the record of this administration when it comes to appointing officials who are independent, do you have concerns about the future of the national taxpayer advocate in the hands of these particular officials who will name that independent individual?

Nina Olson: I actually don't. First of all, I knew the people who were being considered when I walked out the door and I thought they would be very independent. That was a good sign. I also think every single administration has had difficulty with the independence of the Office of the Taxpayer Advocate. Democrats or Republicans; it doesn't matter. You have someone in there that's actually raising concerns about the proposals or the direction that the IRS is going and often maybe some of the legislation that the administration is proposing. I have criticized every single administration's legislative recommendations in one form or another at times. Other times I've supported them. I do think that the Treasury secretaries have understood that having an independent voice actually helps further compliance with the tax law.  

Having an independent area of the IRS that advocates for taxpayers and takes their cases theoretically should keep it from blowing up again like it did leading up to RA 98. I know a lot of people talk about RA 98 like, "Everything was exaggerated." Well, I'm here to tell you that I was there in 1995, 1996, and 1997 representing low-income, small businesses, and moderate-income taxpayers. I can tell you what it was like trying to work with people in the IRS. They were very good people, but there were other people that were making decisions that were outrageous. My office, the Taxpayer Advocate Service, handled all of the Senate Finance cases and all the Ways and Means cases, the cases that came in as a result of those hearings, and they were not frivolous cases. They would raise your eyebrows at some of the things. Even when I came in in 2001, there were still 800 cases around when I walked through the door to see what had happened, and what it took to resolve those cases and make them right. The Taxpayer Advocate Service keeps that from happening again.   

What disturbed me the most about the 501(c)(4) debacle was that those taxpayers didn't feel like they could come to the Taxpayer Advocate Service. Maybe they didn't even know about the Taxpayer Advocate Service, because nonprofits may think, "That doesn't apply to me. I'm a business entity. It's for low-income people or something." Over the two and half years that that issue was building and those cases were being frozen in the exempt organization division, TAS got 19 cases from EOs out of almost a million cases that we got over that same period of time. That saddened me when, as soon as it blew up, I was like, "What have we got?" Well, we had nothing. They went to like six different offices. It's impossible to see a pattern. You can't connect dots when there's only one case in an office. And in fact, there was one office that had several cases, and they did connect the dots. Right when it was blowing up, they had elevated it to our systemic advocacy function, and they were beginning to delve into it. So that was sad to me that we couldn't have seen it earlier and intervened.

But that's really the role of the Taxpayer Advocate Service: to intervene before those things blow up. If the IRS is ignoring it, then you have the tools of the annual report to Congress and your testimony to be able to write about it and draw public attention to it.

 

William Hoffman: We spoke last week about the Free File memorandum of understanding, the revised memorandum and the removal, especially of the fillable forms prohibition. You surprised me a bit in that you didn't seem to be as enthusiastic for the idea of the IRS taking on this role as maybe I'd gotten the impression in the past. Have your feelings about that changed? Or did I misinterpret?

Nina Olson: No, I don't think it's a matter of lack of enthusiasm. I want to see how that's rolled out.

William Hoffman: How what is rolled out?

Nina Olson: If the IRS is going to do something in that field. 

William Hoffman: Which they have said so far they are not.

Nina Olson: Right. It may be that taking that language out, they arrived at some agreement that said the Free File Alliance will stand back and not seek that legislation. The IRS won't intervene in this if they'll just take out that language from the agreement. Everyone will go, "Oh, boy, the IRS will get in this area." Then they never get in this area. I mean, my concern about the IRS  

William Hoffman: That's something we should know about isn't it?

Nina Olson: One should think so. I don't have any communication with people. 

What I do know is that the IRS is incredibly challenged with IT. That was at the very beginning of Free File when the White House, in 2000 and 2001, with this decision wanted to have a free electronic filing and a free fillable 1040 on whitehouse.gov. So taxpayers would go to whitehouse.gov to file their taxes. Former IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti felt that he was in charge of the big lift. They'd just come out of a total blowup about IT and it was just like, "We don't have the bandwidth to do that." That is when the Free File Alliance sort of stepped in and said, "Well, we'll do it." The big guys were already providing free electronic filing on their own websites. The alliance came up because there were anti-competition and monopoly concerns that everybody had to play in this field. That's why no one entity can serve more than X percent of the eligible taxpayers.

Over the years, basically with my fussing every year in the annual report to Congress, Free File created these free fillable forms, which was my point. The government's obligation is to create a free electronic analog, a digital replacement for paper forms. We should use the electronic advances to do the math, carry the number from one page to another, click immediately to the instructions for that topic in the instructions. If the instructions cite a pub, click to that pub. If the instructions have a worksheet, fill out the worksheet. Put the number into the form so people don't make transcription errors or typing errors. That's what I think the government should do. 

Free fillable forms came about in response to my fussing. It's pretty far along to where I want. If the IRS really wanted to do something in this field, it could put out a request for proposals on something like free fillable forms and just contract that. It doesn't have the people to design a software program. It doesn't do software. It has some programmers, but for any major thing it's putting out contracts. It's contractors, the private sector, that is doing any build in the IRS, including the online account. 

William Hoffman: Has anybody looked into the cost of building out free fillable forms to the extent that it does the things you're describing? I talked with a number of people from my story and they were all over the place. You were making the case that it was something that would take a lift, but it was doable. There were other people I talked to who said there's no way fillable forms is ready for that.

Nina Olson: Have any of those people ever used free fillable forms? 

William Hoffman: I don't know.

Nina Olson: I use it to file my returns. I have for the last five or six years, ever since it was started, because I do not want to pay anyone for the privilege of preparing my taxes and paying my taxes. There are things that are clunky about it, but it is very far along. The second component of free fillable forms, which is not just for free fillable forms but for anybody, and this is the big lift, is making the tax data we do have available to taxpayers to download. Whether it's into their own software product, their preparer's software product, just to print out a list that they can give to their preparers or work off of or fill it in to free fillable forms. That would take the heavy lift because you've got security concerns. But all of that security's already built into free fillable forms or it wouldn't be opened.

It's not as hard as people talk about. I have watched it like a hawk over the years. Maybe, they're saying, because only 3 million or so people use it. I don't know that more than 3 million or 5 million people would use it, even if they enhanced it. People like the software products that give them bells and whistles. They like the ones that hook to their accounting system, their payroll system, and their investment accounts. That's what the private sector fills. I am baffled by the sense that the IRS would be competing with the private sector. But I do think that the IRS has an obligation to provide to its taxpayers a free electronic version of a 1040.

William Hoffman: Have you been successful in filing using free fillable forms? Or has it ever come back on you with, "We've got an error. Now you're under audit or exam?"

Nina Olson: No. I have had audits because I was an IRS employee.

William Hoffman: But not because of your experience?

Nina Olson: No. Sometimes there are glitches. For the first few years I would call up Context and Intuit because I think they're the ones who designed it, and say, "It doesn't do this."

William Hoffman: We're coming up on the new filing season. It is going to debut the form 1040-SR. Didn't you have something to do with that? 

Nina Olson: I never recommended the SR. I think that the first time that it went around was 2005. That was important because the IRS was running out of returns on the 1040. They actually had a model.

William Hoffman: Before we go any further, I guess we should explain what the 1040-SR is.

Nina Olson: This is for seniors, which I am now. I'm not ready to be a senior. But anyway, it's sort of designed around the elements that a senior taxpayer would have, like pensions, Social Security, etc. You're really designing it so that they could just file a simple form and you don't have to deal with all the other lines on the 1040. The 1040-A didn't have some of those lines and the 1040-EZ certainly didn't.

William Hoffman: All of which are now gone.

Nina Olson: Yes, they're gone. Back in 2005 there was a conversation about having a senior form. There was also an actual prototype for a form that simplified the 1040 and had a separate schedule. That was a schedule where you took things like pension, some of the items that the IRS knew had low usage that was on the 1040 front page and they moved them onto the Schedule O so that the vast majority of Americans would have larger type and more space for the 1040. If you had these other items, you just had to fill out one schedule. Now we have six schedules that are half a page or three quarters of a page.

William Hoffman: They cut it down to three. 

Nina Olson: Have they cut it down? See, I've been out of that. But that's good, because I think they got a lot of fussing as a result of it. The postcard thing was not anything the IRS wanted to do. That was completely driven by Treasury. I know many people in the IRS, in the year that they were implementing TCJA, to have to do this form was an incredible heavy lift. It is just to the credit of the people in wage and investment that they pulled that off. I'm glad that there was the response back so that sort of a little bit more sanity has ruled from those silly six forms.

William Hoffman: Are there any other leftover aspects of the TCJA that you think are going to either help or bedevil taxpayers and practitioners in the filing season?

Nina Olson: I really want to see what happens with section 199A. I want to see who's filing it. I want to see the results of it. I want to see what kind of compliance the IRS is doing in it. They have not done very many sole proprietorship audits, and they keep trying to do sole proprietorship audits like correspondence exam, which is the most ineffective way to do self-employed audits. There's no way you can uncover cash when in a correspondence exam.

It'll be very interesting to see what they do with section 199A and whether they intend to do them as correspondence exams. Or do they want to send these freshly minted revenue agents out into the field? What kind of training are they going to have? I really don't know. It'll be also interesting to see how some of the unregulated return preparers deal with section 199A. People who haven't been getting the continuing education are going to see this as "Oh, 20 percent. Have we got a deal for you." How does that show up on the returns and who's going to be targeted for audits based on some of those initiatives?

William Hoffman: We've also noticed, especially in some oversight reports and some reporting in recent years, about questions regarding 1023-EZ. That's the form for registering your nonprofit tax exempt. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on where that might be going or what we in the tax community should be looking for in that particular corner of exempt?

Nina Olson: First, I went through the whole 1023 process to get the determination ruling on the Center for Taxpayer Rights. That took some significant amount of work. But it also meant that I had to articulate what the purpose was of the organization and address various concerns that might come up based on the questions that they were asking. The Community Tax Law Project had an initiative where we counseled nonprofits and prepared 1023 for nonprofits who served the low-income population, the same population we were serving. We really forced them, before we even began preparing the 1023, before the 1023-EZ, to write their narrative statement to explain what they saw themselves doing. If they couldn't articulate that, then they weren't ready to be an entity with all the responsibilities.

What the IRS has done with the 1023-EZ is dumb it down to such a level that you see the results that show up in the taxpayer advocate's report. When I was the taxpayer advocate, I think we did two or three studies. This year they were doing another study, and I read that as soon as report came out and it's no better. Something like almost half of the nonprofits in the states that you can get free access to their filings online didn't meet the organizational test. That means you either didn't describe an exempt purpose or you didn't have the clauses that the IRS puts in the instructions like, "Put these words in your articles of incorporation," and they couldn't even do that. 

Just the examples in the report about one person saying, "I'm going to use this basically to pay for myself to run for political office." Excuse me? That entity has a 1023 determination letter. That's robbing all of us, and the IRS is just facilitating that. I don't understand why they aren't checking the articles when they're getting the applications. We timed it. It takes at the most seven minutes per 1023 application. That versus decades of being able to get a write-off and tax exemption for something you're not exempt for is just a scandal. I don't know why Congress isn't more on that case.

William Hoffman: One of your most passionate areas of commitment was to the Taxpayer Bill of Rights. I know that it seems like over the years we've gone through several phases where the IRS adopts a taxpayer bill of rights at some level, but it doesn't seem to be the kind of commitment that you were looking for. Congress got into the act a few years ago. Give us the status on this. Are taxpayer rights being taken seriously in any of the areas that you labeled as taxpayer rights? Are there areas where the behavior of the IRS has met your standards and other areas where it hasn't?

Nina Olson: I have to say that my goal was first to get either Congress to enact a taxpayer bill of rights or IRS to adopt it if Congress wasn't going to enact it. IRS chose to adopt it, and kudos to former Commissioner John Koskinen, who saw that as a very positive thing, as something to begin to restore taxpayer trust in the IRS. The IRS did a serious effort working with the Taxpayer Advocate Service after June 2014 to do some publicity about the Taxpayer Bill of Rights. We did think that they hadn't done enough training on it. Incorporating the Taxpayer Bill of Rights into their training and not just repeating it like, "Taxpayers have the right to quality service." But what does that mean when you're a revenue agent? What does that mean when you're on the phone as an ACS employee? The right to quality service. What does it mean that you have a right to pay no more than the correct amount of tax if you are on correspondence exam? How does that change how you approach the taxpayer's issue that they're bringing you?

We wanted to see in the training and in the IRMs specific examples how this language and the description of the language that the IRS has adopted, which was heavily negotiated between myself and the senior leadership team of the IRS, what that meant to the front line employee. As time goes on and it's no longer needed as the PR thing, it sort of gets just repeated as a checklist. Sort of like Publication 1 is when you have an appointment with the revenue officer or the revenue agent, and they hand you this thing. Then they say in their quality review, "I've advised them of their rights." Some revenue officers take it very seriously, and they read them through their rights. Others just hand them it and they've met their quality stand for that case.

In my view, every time you talk about enforcement, you need to talk about the rights that accrue to the taxpayer in the context of that enforcement. You start with a broad statement of the right, and then you bring it down to what that specifically means in the context of an exam or context of collection. That's how you get people in the IRS to really see it every day of their lives. That takes dedication. That takes consistency.

William Hoffman: It seems like it'd be a very difficult thing to measure, to quantify, to say the IRS is consistently addressing and respecting taxpayer rights on a one to five scale. Is there any way to do that?

Nina Olson: That's why we tried on several most serious problems to actually take their training materials and look at where they bring up concrete examples where you relate a specific right to what's happening in this case. How would it drive your action? Or that you give employees case studies and then talk through both the legal steps that you need to take and take a financial statement. How do you read the financial statement? But then, where do rights come in? The right to privacy, the action should be no more intrusive than necessary. Maybe that leads you to an offer and compromise rather than saying, "Pay it now." How do you apply that?

We were really looking at the training and you can look at the IRM and go, "They're putting this in there, and this is what IRS employees live by." If it's in there, at some point, somebody's going to have to confront it, or a representative can say, "Wait a minute, look at this provision. This is how you're supposed to apply it." We're looking at how they are rating the cases and advising the taxpayer of their rights. Are you looking at the case history to see what really happened there? On your case reviews you could pick that somebody took an action that did not comport with no more intrusive than necessary. So when you do a case review, you can say, "You didn't meet that standard." 

We do that in the Taxpayer Advocate Service. We did that in doing our case reviews. Our statistically representative sample of our cases that we looked at every single month for every single office. Without having a score of one to five, you can put into place processes without having it be a report card. The end result is not that you passed the mark, but that you want people to understand and think through issues from a taxpayer rights perspective. I keep saying to IRS compliance employees: thinking about it through a taxpayer rights perspective does not lessen your tools to enforce the law. You still have all of those. It just makes sure that you use them in an appropriate way and in a legitimate way, and that itself will encourage taxpayer compliance.

William Hoffman: Tell us a little bit more about your International Taxpayer Rights Conference. This is the one scheduled for South Africa. Interesting choice of venue. Why South Africa?

Nina Olson: Early on I decided that it was an international conference, so it just couldn't be U.S. weighted. We did the first one in 2015 in the U.S. It was just easy to do it in Washington, D.C. The second one we had an offer from Vienna, one of the universities there, to host it. We thought, "This is great. This will make it international in its second year." Then we had an offer from the Netherlands to host it and then I thought, "Well, that's getting European centric, too. We need to be like in the U.S. for one year, in Europe somewhere for one year, and then somewhere else, whether it's India, Brazil, Australia, or Africa."

I'd wanted to do it in Africa for a really long time. I had some contacts there and I thought, "The African countries are developing countries working on human rights. They're struggling. They have a very small tax base. They have been former colonies so often they don't have infrastructure. They have issues with corruption." This would be a challenge. How do you implement taxpayer rights in a developing country? That brings up the issues of human rights.

That's the theme of the conference: Taxpayer rights as human rights. It's at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and the African Tax Institute is the host. The Human Rights Center will also be a player in this. We will have the opening panel on taxpayer rights as human rights. What does that mean? In the U.S., we don't have a strong tradition of human rights like European countries do with the European Court of Human Rights. We look at the Constitution, but thinking about these things in that perspective really opens your eyes to some things.

The panels include discussions on digitalization of taxation in developing countries and other different topics. We have a lot of people from different African countries, from developing countries, and then some Europeans and Americans. The panels are very diverse, and we have a couple of revenue commissioners coming from Greece and South Africa as well as some deputy revenue commissioners from Ghana, Uganda, the chief judge of the United States Tax Court, and a retired judge from South African courts. I'm just really looking forward to what's coming up. It's going to be probably the best conference we've given.

William Hoffman: Sounds like quite an agenda. I wonder about the concept of taxpayer rights in the international arena because the experience of taxpayers with their governments collecting taxes is so different around world. In the U.S., we call it voluntary compliance. Whatever you call it, you still got over 90 percent compliance and for the most part it takes place without violence. There are countries around the world, where basically they come and take your property one way or another, and where the compliance rates are low. I'm just curious how you reconcile the concept of taxpayer rights in a world where most taxpayers don't think of themselves as having rights.

Nina Olson: I think that's part of the discussion. I think the thing that has been my credo is that I don't judge. I come in and I listen. I've spent a lot of time in other countries over the years talking to their tax administrations and listening to the challenges of tax administrations in countries that don't have infrastructure or have different cultures to ours. I think as much as people hate taxes, the U.S. taxpayer is generally law abiding. They hate paying taxes. They may distrust the government, but they are law abiding, and that's part of their credo.

That's not necessarily true in some other countries because the laws have been either oppressive, put on them by other countries, or the laws apply to some but not to others in the case of corruption. Or they don't get public goods from the government. The government is for somebody else, not for me. I think there it's just having a conversation. You can look at how their tax system is designed and what they're trying to achieve with their tax system. Learn from that and share with people and respond to what they're saying. The first thing that you may want to do is not give them a taxpayer advocate. They may need something much more rudimentary. 

I remember somebody who worked in a country, and I won't say which one it was, on an IMF project. The country's tax agency had heard all about this exchange of information agreements, and they wanted one of those. He went out to some of the local tax offices where it was the monsoon season, and there was basically 12 inches of water in an office and the tax returns and the files were on the floors. What they needed were metal filing cabinets on a box above the water level. They didn't need an information exchange agreement. It's that kind of thing to get at the root of things in the conversations and then build on that. These exchanges, people take away ideas. They take what is possible for them at that moment instead of me coming in or anybody else coming in and saying, "This is what you need to do." Listen to them.

William Hoffman: I wondered if the linkage you were making between taxpayer rights and human rights was kind of the bridge to this. Because while we may have wildly different understandings of what taxpayer rights are human rights. In the last 40 years since Jimmy Carter made it front and center of his presidency, every president has at least paid lip service to it. Then we have a pretty general understanding of what human rights are, and maybe by linking that into taxpayer right, somehow

Nina Olson: I don't know whether people in the U.S. have a pretty good understanding of what human rights are. We throw that word around. But if you really look at the law, it has to do with human dignity. That is the underpinning of it. That's the point of taxpayer rights: that you treat taxpayers right. 

What I've learned through talking in Africa with people is that they're struggling with basically providing the public goods that give humans dignity. Housing, shelter, health care, education and those what the United Nations call sustainable development goals. How do you get them? You can get them through state-owned enterprises. But if you have corruption, if that's how the government raises money, by owning electricity, by owning mines, or whatever. Then you use that revenue to provide public goods to your people, which recognizes their dignity, that's great. Unless you have corruption which peels that money off and you never get those public goods out to the people. What some of the African countries are realizing is that they can't just depend on international donors. They don't want to depend on colonial powers or former colonial powers. State-owned enterprises are tainted. Taxation is where it is. It's the vehicle to get public goods. 

If I stopped a person on the street in the U.S. and asked them, "What do you think is the point of taxation?" Most people would say, "It's just to take the money and build up Washington, D.C." They would not say, "To give me back the roads. To help fund research in hospitals. To cure cancer. To provide grants to local schools for education." They would not talk about public goods. That's part of what I want to talk about in the U.S. and our education program through the center. The work that I'm doing internationally is raising my awareness of this. The U.S. is really behind the developing countries in a recognition of what taxation is about.

William Hoffman: Well, Nina Olson, executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights. Thank you very much for joining us. 

Nina Olson: Thank you.

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