Menu
Tax Notes logo

A Conversation With the Taxpayer Advocate: Exit Interview

David Stewart: I am joined in the studio by Tax Notes Today senior reporter William Hoffman. Bill, welcome back.

William Hoffman: Thank you, David.

David Stewart: Last week we had the first part of your interview with National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, where she discussed the 2018 filling season, program manager technical advice, and congressional efforts to get President Trump’s tax returns. We’re about to listen to the second half of that interview. What did you talk about?

William Hoffman: As opposed to a policy matters, we talk more, in the second half of the interview, about her personal and professional experiences, and how they had affected her work as the National Taxpayer Advocate. One thing that I found most enlightening was her willingness to admit and even express her frustration, even her anger – she used that word during the interview – over how difficult it is to make things work for taxpayers at the IRS. The biggest problem seems to be institutionalized bureaucracy and inertia. And I really wonder how someone goes into that process and learns their way around. According to Nina in this interview, it took her five or six years before she felt steady inside the IRS bureaucracy. She also dropped a hint about her future plans. She is going to well…she’s having opened for her – I think is the way she described it – a nonprofit that will be tax advocacy for lower-income and other taxpayers. Along the lines of what she’s been doing at the IRS for the last 18 years.

David Stewart: All right, well as I mentioned last week for listeners. This was recorded in a conference room at the National Taxpayer Advocate’s office, at IRS headquarters in Washington. So you may hear some stray noises in the background. Enjoy.

William Hoffman: Well, switching gears again a little bit. Obviously, you are leaving Taxpayer Advocate Service. July 31st is your last day, I understand?

Nina Olson: [LAUGH] Yeah.

William Hoffman: Okay, congratulations.

Nina Olson: I know everybody says “congratulations.”

William Hoffman: How has taxpayer advocacy changed over the last 18 years? What laws or regulations changed to make it harder or easier, and maybe more importantly, what tools or technologies have emerged over the last 18 years that have simplified or complicated the job?

Nina Olson: Well, the technology thing is – I’ll start there and go back, and you can remind me if I’ve missed something – but the technology thing is what has been frustrating to me and was that we really did do a major effort to replace our case management system and our case management system is shut off from the rest of the IRS because we have a confidentiality provision. Unless we release the information about the taxpayer to the IRS that they’ve given us, they can’t see it. And that’s under the statutory provision, 7803(c). And so we really did a major revamp and we designed it so that not only was it easier for employees, but it anticipated electronic communication with the taxpayer, and both receiving information and being able to visually see one another in email back and forth. And it also really was set up in a way that it was creating electronic case files, converting data into digital documents, which would save lots of time and space. And then, as well, give us so much more information that we could analyze. We’re limited by our case management system in the way that – it was designed in the 1970s – it’s the same system that was for the problem resolution officers. It’s on a –

William Hoffman: I guess I’m a little unclear though. Did this new system…?

Nina Olson: This new system got stopped.

William Hoffman: Okay.

Nina Olson: We had done 60 percent of it and then –

William Hoffman: When did it get stopped?

Nina Olson: 2014 or 2015.

William Hoffman: Why?

Nina Olson: Because I was too successful in convincing everybody it was such a great thing, that they decided that they wanted to replace it with the Enterprise Case Management system. And also because they had stopped all non-FATCA and -ACA IT activity for a period of time, and so there was a moratorium first, and by the time we said “okay, now we’re ready to pick this back up again,” IT had decided that they were going to do an enterprise case management system. Which I supported but I didn’t want my system stopped, so instead we put all of our attention into ECM. And we still don’t have a product to deliver on ECM, although we will be really picking up what we have designed so far and putting it into our version of VCN. We’re gonna be playing in that sandbox. It won’t happen while I’m here, but there’s an incredible foundation of work. So we’re struggling along with an ancient system that is very frustrating to my employees, and I’m very frustrated that I haven’t been able to deliver that to them.

William Hoffman: I guess what I was referring to, though, by taxpayer advocacy change over the past 18 years is more along the lines of communication with taxpayers, for instance. I mean, is it easier or harder to communicate even – I mean, you’re talking about internal and case management stuff, which is obviously important –
 

Nina Olson: Yeah, but’s also communication with the taxpayers –

William Hoffman: But it is, right, it’s outreach and things like that, and I’m wondering have things like Twitter and Facebook made a substantial difference as far as taxpayer advocacy, good or bad? Has the budget, which is a perennial problem, especially over the last 10 years, curtailed your travel activities, or has it been sufficient? Things along that kind of…

Nina Olson: Well, you know, I’ll come back to the digital communication. I mean, the beauty of the Taxpayer Advocate Service is that it is required by law to be at least one office in every single state. And I do believe that if that weren’t in the law, we would be under so much pressure to eliminate offices in Rhode Island, in Wyoming, in Montana, and have circuit riders and so…and in fact we’ve had to fight as time went – you know, when people in the real estate, they don’t know what’s in the law. You know, they will come in saying “we wanna close this office,” and it’s like “over our dead body,” and also 7803(c) says no. What we did, and this really was an initiative that was started by me, is…my folks had actually started a separate initiative which is to look at, in terms of staffing, where were we getting cases from? And this is about five years ago. Where were their concentrations of cases and we’d need more employees in certain offices? I said to them you also need to look at not just where we’re getting cases now, but where should we be getting cases from? Where are the underserved populations? And so they used census data and they used our case data, but also where IRS was doing work, you know, where were the audits, etc.? Looked at where the military bases were, where there were English as a second language population, income levels. And we identified a whole number of locations where we didn’t have offices that you would think that we would be getting cases from because of the makeup of the taxpayer population. So at that point we said, “here’s what we’re going to do,” and this really went to how I feel about how we relate to taxpayers: We still have some offices, often in the IRS campuses, or in some of our larger offices, where we may have 40 to 50 employees. That’s five groups of employees, 10 to a group. The local Taxpayer Advocate cannot know everything that’s going on in an office of that size. And so I said that, “over time we wanna get down to the point that no office has than 20 employees.” That’s something you can get your hands around, you’ll know the employees in that office. You’ll know who’s struggling, you’ll know who needs help, you’ll know who can be a good teacher, all those sorts of things. And you can manage the relationship with the taxpayers in that office. You can know how they’re being treated. So we’ve a policy of shrinking the larger offices as people retire, as people get other jobs. We will not back-fill in that office. We will take that slot and put it in one of the new locations where we think there is a population that we need to serve. And so over the last three years we have opened six maybe new offices, and we probably have another five or six over the next three years that we’re going to open. And they’re small offices, they maybe start with five people. We may want them to go up to 10 or something. But we’re just putting a footprint out there. And the importance of that is, the IRS itself is shrinking away. It is going into centralized sites. It is disappearing in the community. And I don’t know how you’re gonna get compliance, if you’re not in the community. I keep saying to people “compliance is local.” You need to know what’s going on in that community. They need to see you out there in that community. It’s not just social media presence. You can do stuff from a national office on social media and it will be irrelevant to Fargo, North Dakota, because it doesn’t know. They don’t know what’s going on in Fargo, North Dakota. Now if there’s an employee in Fargo, North Dakota, that can do social media about the issues that you’re seeing, or maybe there’s one return preparer that you’ve been looking at and they’re real problems, you can say, “Be careful, folks. Here’s a scam we’re seeing in Fargo, North Dakota.” That’s relevant. And any behavioral psychologist will tell you that when you personalize the information to your situation, that’s when people pay attention, rather than the other stuff that just goes yada, yada, yada, it’s over your head. And that’s what we’re able to do. And then the next thing that went with it was about three years ago. One of my offices actually went out and started doing problem solving days. They just took a couple of their employees and just showed up at like a local bar association meeting or CPA meeting. And said, “Hi, we’ll be here, we’ll take cases, and we’ll talk to you if you have questions about your cases, you can make appointments.” We thought that was so brilliant that we put that in the requirements for every single local taxpayer advocate, that every office is going to do problem solving days. And they can do them with CPA societies. They can go to domestic violence shelters. They can go to trade fairs of veterans or for hiring fairs. They can go to trucker fairs where they’re looking at neat trucks, and we have a little booth to help them, and it’ll be digitally aligned to look things up. And that – it’s using digital, but it’s bringing us to the people. And the benefit of that also is, it gets my employees out of the office, and it gets them to actually be able to see how grateful people are. And that buoys them up, because they’re being screamed at day in and day out, either by the taxpayers who are frustrated or by IRS employees who are saying, “Why are you making me do this work?” And so to get them out there to say “we are so grateful that you are here and you’ve shown up” is a really positive thing. And it also helps us find cases that we wouldn’t necessarily find. So the whole initiative has been to get us out among the people and into the locations where we need to be. And the last piece of that initiative is something we’re piloting very soon. Any moment now, we will be receiving delivery of the first task van. And this is something that I’ve wanted – I’ve been telling the IRS for years, you should be getting vans to go out to the rural areas. Do a circuit, go to library parking lots in the middle of West Virginia. And on the third Wednesday of every month they know that the IRS is gonna show up and they’ll be linked digitally and they can address problems. If there’s a disaster, you can take the van, and even if there’s no infrastructure, you have a van that’s linked up. You can do – you can get people transcripts, all sorts of stuff. So the IRS has said, “no, no, no, we’re not doing that.” And so last year, we had a meeting with my leadership and I was ranting about the IRS not doing a van, and one of my leaders said, “My next door neighbor works with GSA, has a contract with GSA to provide vans.” And I was like, “Okay, you’ve been now nominated to figure out how we get a van.” And nine months later we have a lease on a van. And it doesn’t have any seating in it, it’s really a cargo van that will have its own energy pack source. And we have a little tent that comes off of it that’s got three sides so we can have meetings with taxpayers. And it will be wrapped in the Taxpayer Bill of Rights. So that it’ll drive around the back roads of wherever, or go to disasters, educating people about the rights. And it will be in Lexington, Kentucky, in a parking garage associated with IRS. It’s part of the IRS fleet and people can – offices in the center of the country, for part of this pilot, can sign up and say, “I’d like to check out the van to go do a rural trip, or if there is a disaster we can check the van out to go down to the disaster.” And if it works, we’ll at least get a van for the east coast and the west coast and then we’ll see. It’s not very expensive. I think it’s like $214 a month lease. So for the coverage and the outreach that we will get – and then again, the problems that we will probably see that we right now don’t have any knowledge about – it’s really worth $214 a month.

William Hoffman: Okay, can’t wait to see it.

Nina Olson: Yeah, I hope I get to see it, but that is the kind of initiatives that we are trying to do. The other initiative that has really changed is that we have created a call site for task cases. When people call the IRS – and this is where most of our cases come from – they come from the 1040 line, or they come from the toll-free number that’s the NTA case intake line. But both of those lines are staffed by IRS employees, Wage and Investment employees. And historically when they thought that they had a case to qualify for TAS, they loaded it on our case management system. They sent it over to us. Well, that sets up a delay right there. We don’t get the call in real time. We have to call back the taxpayer. We’re playing telephone tag. It could take three days if it’s there on a Friday, then you’ve got three days until a Monday or a Tuesday that you’re calling back. Harm could happen in that despite everybody’s best efforts. So several years ago, we created in 2005 a position called the intake advocate, who would take in the case and sort of do some case-building before we got it assigned to a case advocate. And we built on that position to actually create some call sites under TAS. So these would be TAS employees. And we started with the NTA toll-free line, that when you call the Wage and Investment line, then talk to the Wage and Investment employee – we needed them still because about 75 percent of the calls are things that we don’t need to deal with. They’re not even related to TAS, they’re just…somebody found a toll-free number and you know – so I want them peeled off and Wage and Investment does that. So then the other 25 percent, when they think it’s really a case in TAS, now what they do is they gate that call over in real time to our intake advocate. So there’s no delay, and we basically got more authorities for our intake advocates, so they can actually solve some things themselves right on that call and it doesn’t necessarily need to become a case. Or they can do the stuff that’s an emergency, like put a collection hold on the case so things don’t get worse while we get it to a case advocate, and they can also build the case better and talk the taxpayer through. These are the things you’re gonna start needing to gather so you’re ready by the time the case advocate contacts you. And we have seen real improvements on that. And what we’re trying to do and what we’ve talked to the Hill about, and this goes to the budget, is that we really need an increase in our budget in order to be able to take the calls from the 1040 line, and be able to run them through the intakes. We can’t do it with the staffing that we’ve got.

William Hoffman: What kind of response are you getting to that, may I ask?

Nina Olson: They were interested. They understood the process. And it was really – it really will increase productivity. And also, since we’re dealing with people with significant hardships, time is of the essence, and I want somebody with authority to talk to those people in real time if it’s at all possible.

William Hoffman: It seems like a triage process.

Nina Olson: It is, it is and it’s also an immediate aid process, too. It’s both. That you’re able to prevent harm from getting worse. And also they’re able to say, “This case needs attention now.” So they can send that case out to the local office and say, “This case needs to be signed like within the next hour.” And under the old process, and what’s happening now on the 1040 line, that case just gets into a queue, and somebody eventually picks it up and then tries to get in touch with the taxpayer, and by that point, terrible things may have happened. So it’s very important both for a productivity issue and a triage thing, but also for really addressing the cases where there’s immediate harm.

William Hoffman: What qualities do you think your successor is going to need, or perhaps more importantly, need not to have to be effective inside the IRS?

Nina Olson: Well, Congress has already spoken to that in the statute. It says you have to have it –

William Hoffman: Yeah, but I’m not talking about the statute.

Nina Olson: Yeah, no, no, let me just say this, because I’ll key off of that. Is that Congress said you have to have had experience representing individual taxpayers, and that word “individual’s” very important. It’s not like that you’ve had transactional, you’ve been out in practice, that you’ve written for private letter rulings or whatever, or you’ve done transfer pricing cases, or that you’ve been in corporate counsel. You have to have represented individual taxpayers before the IRS. So they’re looking for a particular kind of controversy lawyer. And I say the kinda person who’s lived their lives in code section 6000 and beyond. And so to me that’s the first thing. I’m looking for somebody that’s really done controversy work. And the kind of controversy work that is working in the muck in the collection cases…because that’s where you see the power of the IRS. And then you really have to have…you could call it passion, you could call it stubbornness, you could call it – it’s a combination of all of those things. You really have to have someone who is willing to keep going when you’ve been told “no” eight times. Just because if you think that this needs to be done, then continuing to advocate is key. Listening to the other side because you may have to adapt your position. Part of the difficulty of my job is actually finding out why the IRS really isn’t implementing what I’m recommending. Because you’ll get resources, you’ll get that as an excuse. You’ll get some other excuse. And it often takes a couple of years to actually find out what they’re really not worried about. And then when you hear that, it’s like, “Oh, well, how about this?” And it’s at that point that you’re beginning to have a conversation, but you have to wear them down [LAUGH] over two years or find the right person, or have enough conversations that they know that you’re not going away.

William Hoffman: So, persistence.

Nina Olson: It is persistence. And so that’s gonna take it, and not getting discouraged. And I also think you have to be, in a way, indefatigable. The other thing is people underestimate how much management and leadership is involved in this job. It’s not just writing the Annual Report to Congress, it’s not just testifying, but all the things that people see and say, “Oh, I’d love to do that.” It’s like 90 percent of my job is dealing with employees, encouraging them to be indefatigable. Don’t get jaded. What about this case? What about this case? What union issues do we have? What staffing issues do we have?

William Hoffman: Is some of it sharp elbows?

Nina Olson: Well, I think that people know that if they blow me off, they won’t get rid of me and I will be there. There have been times where I have used anger as a tool to move things on. I myself am a very passionate person.

William Hoffman: Yes, but is this something you’d recommend for your successor?

Nina Olson: Well, no, because I think everybody has their own style. That’s why I’m not saying…the next person may not need to have sharp elbows. The next person –

William Hoffman: But that’s what I’m asking-

Nina Olson: But the next person –

William Hoffman: Do they need sharp elbows to do your job?

Nina Olson: The next person has to be willing to say, “I am not going anywhere, and you are going to have to deal with me.” Now, how they say that when they walk through the door…I guarantee to you, five years? They will be doing it. It will be somewhat differently. They will learn on the job. You cannot know how you’re going to react. What you do need to know is that you have to have that core in yourself that if I believe this is the right answer, then I will continue to advocate. I will continue to be there. I will not give up. And if that requires sharp elbows, I am willing to do that. If it requires negotiation and there is room for compromise, I am willing to do it. I am willing to listen. I am willing to do what needs to be done to deliver what is my mission for the taxpayers of the United States. And you learn, as I really have, I have learned to be able to take the anger of others and terrible things that people have said to me, and carry on. I do a lot of self-reflection. In every single interaction with people in the IRS, you think,  “How could I have done that better?” Because I blow it all the time. I get angry or I am not as tactful as maybe as I wanted to be or something. And I will walk away from that interaction, every single interaction, and assess how could I have done that better. And I try to incorporate them the next time. But don’t mistake that for…I am not going away. And that’s what that person has to have, that determination to not go away. And the way that you get that is you really do stick to the statute. I mean, I spent a lot of time talking to other tax administrations, and I was just in Ireland on a personal trip but we organized a little event with the Irish Tax Institute, and they had brought me there and they brought the U.K. ombudsmen that deals with tax issues. And what was really clear to me, and folks commented on that, was the difference of having a statute and just being given a job, being given a duty, a mission. Just your ability to get things done. And that 7803(c) and 7811 is the backbone for the Taxpayer Advocate. When people say, “Why are you doing that?” I literally just go, “Read the law, that’s the law, that’s what my job is.” And that gives me strength when I’m feeling weak. And then the other thing is, and I’ve talked about this before, very early on when I would come in to commissioners or everybody with different issues, people would say to me, “You need to pick your battles.” That never made any sense to me when I was in private practice working on the clinics. Even more so now, it’s like everybody who’s in TAS is having a significant hardship. How do I tell the person with a significant hardship, “Well, yours isn’t significant enough?” How do I say, “Well, I’m just too tired to pick up your issue?” And I just couldn’t find a way to do that. It was like, “Oh, here’s an issue. Okay, we need to focus on this,” and then there’d be another issue and you’d go, “Oh, here’s another issue. We’ll focus on this one.” And so what I’ve done, and it’s not easy, but this moment, I’m focusing on this. This moment, I’m focusing on that. And I’m pushing as hard as I can on this, I’m pushing as hard as I can on that. And just go from one thing to the next, and over time, you’re gonna come circle back around on this one. And you just can’t give up. And that is the quality that people have to have. It’s not gonna do anybody any favors if you’re not listening. You have to not give up, but you constantly have to be listening because you may need to amend your position. You never know what new piece of information is gonna change. Like, “Wow, I didn’t understand that about what you are doing. Let me go back and think about that. But then I’m gonna be right back at you with my idea about having incorporated what you’ve just raised. I’m not going away.”

William Hoffman: You served as National Taxpayer Advocate for 18 years. Should the National Taxpayer Advocate’s office have a term limit? And if not, why?

Nina Olson: I felt that not having a term limit was helpful, because people always wait you out. They think if you’ve got four years, they can stall you for four years. The other thing is, one advocate creates one initiative, and then you get somebody else in and you drop that initiative, and you move on to the next. I have been so privileged to be able to serve for this period of time. I came in in its infancy and was able to see it into its mid-teens, maybe young adulthood, I don’t know. So I’ll let other people decide that. But to be able to give it that kind of constancy –

William Hoffman: Continuity.

Nina Olson: Continuity and constancy. So if we started an initiative back here, hiring the intake advocates in 2005, I could see it come to fruition with these centralized sites. And that was really important.

William Hoffman: Well, that would seem to place all the more emphasis on the continuity with your successor.

Nina Olson: So, to me, though…first of all, I don’t know that it needs to be 18 years for the next person because I was getting it in its infancy, so there was still a lot of building, like, “What the heck are we doing?” sort of think. So now you’re getting a mature organization that has a real infrastructure around it, so you’re really able to go directionally. You can start initiatives and not have to build it from the ground up. There’s something already there. But I do think it’s important that the term be longer than the commissioner. Or that they be able to outlast the commissioner. So I’m one for liking no term limits. There is a risk of that. You serve at the pleasure of the secretary, so you’re an at-will employee. But if you’re doing a good job, there are a lot of stakeholders in the mix that act as a restraint against just somebody getting angry and firing you. And I think that has proven in fact – I think, for me, I didn’t intend to stay this long. I kept wanting to leave. [LAUGH] But something would happen, and I’d be like, “Well, I have to see the organization through this.”

William Hoffman: When did you start wanting to leave?

Nina Olson: I thought early on that maybe I would stay for six to eight years, to make it through the transition of the commissioner, from Charles Rossotti to whomever it was. And be able to build the organization enough, but be able to leave when I was young enough to do something else. And I also am very conscious, both in my own clinic…I had seen so many nonprofits fall into the founder, the charismatic leader, staying too long and that harming the nonprofit. I had planned my exit from the clinic before I became The Clinic. I felt the same way about the Taxpayer Advocate Service. That, as I said in my announcement, the minute I walked through through the door, I was thinking about institutionalizing the Taxpayer Advocate Service. But then, challenges would come up all along the way, and I would go, “Okay, I need to stay for two more years to see through this,” or I would think, “This is not the right person to select my successor.” I didn’t have any confidence, and when the current commissioner came in, I told him from even before his nomination was announced that I was really happy that he was being considered because I could work with him to select my successor. And that’s important to me also because whoever comes in needs to have some time to get their footing and make relationships and understand the culture of the IRS. You think you understand it, but until you’re inside the building, you won’t understand anything, and I say that having lived through that.

William Hoffman: What’s the closest you ever came to leaving? And why?

Nina Olson: Six months from when I came in, I submitted a letter of resignation to Charles Rossotti.

William Hoffman: Really, why?

Nina Olson: Because I was ticked off at the way the operating division commissioners were responding to me. And I felt that they were stonewalling me and not paying attention to comments that I was making. And so I wrote a letter of resignation, assessing what I had seen and what I saw as the roadblocks to the job, and I got immediate response to that. “Don’t leave,” and the commissioner addressed my concerns. I can say this, it wasn’t like, “I’m resigning tomorrow.” It was like, “These are the things. It’s six months and I’m looking at this, and I don’t see any change and I don’t see anything, and I don’t see why I’m in this job. So unless this is addressed, I will be leaving.”

William Hoffman: That was the closest you came to actually going?

Nina Olson: Yeah, I mean, because all the other times, it’d be like, “Okay, now’s a good time, I need to think about it.” And before I could do anything, something would happen and I’d go, “Okay, I can’t leave yet.” So that’s sort of where it was.

William Hoffman: What’s your most important unfinished project or goal?

Nina Olson: Everybody asks me that. I don’t know. Again, I look at things as we go along. I will be leaving many unfinished projects. That’s why I’ve narrowed my stuff down to a shortlist as to what I need to get done.

William Hoffman: What’s on the top of your shortlist?

Nina Olson: Well, the shortlist I put in my blog, and now I’m gonna try to remember it. We needed to get out guidance on taxpayer systems orders and Taxpayer Advocate directives. The IRMs are very, very old. And since we’ve had years now of issuing taxpayer systems orders and Taxpayer Advocate directives, I wanted to put that accumulated wisdom into an IRM and have it in place so that it would be understood. Because the next National Taxpayer Advocate won’t need to be able to push things through right out of the box. That will be in place before I leave. It’s in circulation now internally, and we will have two IRMs now. On my list was the low-income taxpayer clinic regulations, we have back two years ago…2016…we had been working on these regs for about two or three years. And in 2016, we got them all the way up to the deputy commissioner, and we couldn’t reach an agreement on something. And so I just pulled them back, because it was an issue that I just couldn’t cede. And I have put them back into circulation. They’re with Chief Counsel now. We have a new chief counsel. We’ve had discussions with the commissioner about it. What I would like on that is to be able to reach an agreement by the time I leave so that we have a final internal version. Somebody’s gonna have to find two regs to get rid of in order to get our reg through, but I want the agreement. I don’t know that it needs to be promulgated, but if I can get the agreement, then I’m good. One issue is the issue of the NTA access, ability to ask for advice. I want that clear, and if not, I’ll be speaking about it. And then the fourth one is the hiring of attorney-advisers by the NTA. And we are dealing with that on multiple tracks. We’ve been talking to the general counsel about the hiring of it, making the case to him. And we’ve been talking to the Hill about, could they do some nudges on it? And all those five issues…I didn’t select July 31st randomly. I wanted to be able to write in the June report, “here was my short list, here’s what we got accomplished, this was not accomplished, and this is what needs to be done going forward.” And then have some time to talk about it for a month before I walk out the door and can’t talk to anybody in the IRS for a year.

William Hoffman: Why is that?

Nina Olson: General legal services has said that because I touch everything and anything, my year goes to everybody. And I cannot have any official contact with anyone in the IRS. It’s the ethics rules.

William Hoffman: Okay, are there any limits or prohibitions on your employment opportunities, having left?

Nina Olson: There are rules about how you negotiate employment while you’re in the position. You have to recuse yourself and file a form that goes to GLS if you’re having any actual negotiations. I have gone to GLS to describe what I want to do and what steps I can take while I’m in the position. And I have a memo that’s a personnel memo, so it’s not going to be published, but I’m following it, like a loyalty. I’m not hiding what I’m going to do. I’m going to continue to work in taxpayer rights. We are in the process – we, I say we, I am not able to do this, but someone is forming a nonprofit that will be working on international and domestic taxpayer rights, and that will be my job after I leave.

William Hoffman: When can we see an announcement of that?

Nina Olson: I don’t know, I’ll have to talk to GLS about that.

William Hoffman: This year?

Nina Olson: Oh yeah, no, it’ll be August.

William Hoffman: No, I’m talking about the formation of the nonprofit.

Nina Olson: Yeah, it’ll be August 1st that I start.

William Hoffman: Congratulations.
 

Nina Olson: [LAUGH] Well, I am creating it so it’s what I wanna do.

William Hoffman: Well, I hope you’ll –

Nina Olson: Yeah, it’ll be fun, and it will be a continuation of the advocacy that I’m doing, but I won’t be inside the IRS.

William Hoffman: Well at the risk of going down that “everybody’s asked questions” rabbit hole, looking back, and briefly, can you tell us what was your biggest disappointment?

Nina Olson: I can’t, I really can’t. I really can’t, I don’t, I have –

William Hoffman: What was your biggest mistake?

Nina Olson: That’s a hard one. I have so many mistakes every single day.

William Hoffman: And I guess what did you learn from it, obviously?

Nina Olson: I can’t pinpoint actual things because I make mistakes all the time, and I reflect on them all the time. But I can tell you what I feel like. I have learned a couple of things about myself. I have tried to learn to control my temper more than I did when I came in here. Because it was so frustrating when I came in here and the stonewalling that I so often got, and the way people tried to hide stuff, which we always find out about. And I think as I got more comfortable in the job, then it was easier to control my temper because I was able to know that I would keep pushing. And so, “Okay, they’re saying no now but eventually we’re gonna get there, and I know we’re gonna get there.”

William Hoffman: I don’t want to harp on it, but I use the term biggest in the sense of being most influential. So I’m kinda looking back on…was there something in Congress that you would have liked to have advocated for or advocated for and didn’t get? Was there something in the IRS that particularly you took one side on and it wound up being the other side? Something influential, anything that substantial? Okay.

Nina Olson: I just –

William Hoffman: What was your happiest day?

Nina Olson: My happiest day…I don’t know. I was very glad that the IRS adopted TBOR. But the message that I sent to my employees that very morning was, “Now the hard work begins.” And that’s everything. It’s like I said to them, “We can do a happy dance, happy dance. Now the hard work begins.” So you can’t rest on your laurels because there’s so much out there and it’s not denying, and it’s like – I mean, we celebrate and we’re happy and we are a really close-knit group, all 1,700 of my employees. They all know me. They have my email address. Taxpayers have my email address. I’m out there. And so we have these successes that happen. And then you just have to go, “And now I have to go pay attention to this.” And at the end of the day, I can look back at the work that I’ve done here and think this is incredibly important. I feel very satisfied with what I’ve accomplished. I can look back and go: low-income taxpayer clinics. That was huge, establishing them, getting 7526 grant funding. I did that in my life, along with a lot of people pulling for that. Inside the government, in Congress, Janet, all of us, I was part of that. And I can look at that and go, “I could have stopped right there.” That was enough for a lifetime. I had the privilege of serving here for 18 years and I can look at the Taxpayer Bill of Rights and go, “That is something that will keep giving.” We don’t even know what it will give us going forward. It will be 15 years, 10 to 15 years before we have built a legal infrastructure around the Taxpayer Bill of Rights. And I know lots of people say, “Well, what is it? It’s just in the code and it puts the burden on the commissioner or whatever.” And I’m like, there is a difference between the document the IRS adopted and the fact that it’s in the internal revenue code. We don’t know what that difference is. That’s why we have common law and case law. We will build that out over time, and I believe on the outside I will be part of that. I am submitting my bar application to the United States Supreme Court. One of the things that I have wanted to do in this job, and this is maybe one thing I didn’t get accomplished, is the ability for the NTA to submit amicus briefs on taxpayer rights issues, similar to the way the Small Business Council, General Council for Small Business or whatever, is able to submit amicus briefs on regulations that impact small business. And we had modeled our request on that statutory grant so now I’m just segueing out to be able to participate. I don’t want another client in my entire life, but I would be more than happy on taxpayer rights issues to have the opportunity to work on or submit briefs on issues. And I see that as the next phase, because what I bring with me then on the outside is incredible knowledge of the workings of the IRS. And I think that’s very helpful as we look at some of these taxpayer rights issues.

William Hoffman: Well, just one last question then, if you don’t mind. What is the most important relationship your successor will need to cultivate to be effective in advocating before Congress?

Nina Olson: There are four relationships.

William Hoffman: The tax-writing committees.

Nina Olson: Yeah, at any given point in time one or the other of the four is in the ascendance. You have the commissioner, and then the people underneath the commissioner. But your relationship with the commissioner and your relationship with the chief counselor are incredibly important.

William Hoffman: Right, but I’m not talking about that relationship.

Nina Olson: And then there’s the relationship with the tax-writing committees. It’s not just the tax-writing committees because it’s also the Appropriations committees, and it’s the oversight committees, the government reform and oversight. And so to me, those six committees between House and Senate are the core ones. We also have interactions with Small Business committees and things like that. But those six, for sometimes different issues, but those are the go-to committees. And you really need to have that relationship with them and with their staff.

William Hoffman: But there’s no one that stands out first among equals.

Nina Olson: No, there really isn’t because depending on what you’re trying to get done, one might be the better place than the other. And so you really have to cultivate those relationships. And then you have to have your relationships with the practitioners and the taxpayers, and that’s what I have tried to do by going out to the taxpayers during those public forums that you had to follow me around the country for.

William Hoffman: I enjoyed that.

Nina Olson: It was fun. It was really interesting to go to Red Oak, Iowa, and Hendersonville, North Carolina, or Bronx. It was just eye-opening to go to those places, and that can’t be ignored. And then the final relationship – and I really have to say this – I mean, I could not do my job without my employees. I could not do my job without my immediate staff. I’m gonna get teary about this, but my immediate staff has walked me off the ledge so many times. They have helped me move forward when I have been in despair. And so when I say, “I’m gonna push forward,” there were so many times when I would go, “I can’t do another thing,” and someone would be there to walk me off that ledge. And that tightness of the staff, my immediate staff…I’ve just been so blessed to have people with me for that long. And then you get out to the case advocates in the system, like advocacy people, people who every single day just push against obstacles and people not responding to them. And that can be taxpayers or the IRS, and yet they still do it. It is just amazing. And you just have to understand that TAS is nothing without the people that we have. I mean it. It’s just, really, it’s just not. I could be up there talking like a little talking head and if my people aren’t doing the actual work on a day-to-day basis it would be a fraud, and that’s what’s amazing about this organization. It’s just absolutely amazing. And they inspire me. When I see cases that they’re working on, they’ve got however many cases they’ve got, and they’re going to the mat on that case. And who am I to complain? And that is just amazing to me. It is amazing.

William Hoffman: National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, thank you very much for your time and your service.

Nina Olson: Thank you.

David Stewart: And now, Coming Attractions. Each week, we preview commentary that will be appearing in the next issue of the Tax Notes magazines. We’re joined by Executive Editor for Commentary, Jasper Smith. Jasper, what will you have for us?

Jasper Smith: In Tax Notes, David Forst argues that determining whether intangible value is created in the arm’s-length standard is too amorphous an approach to be used. While Dawn Drnevich and Greg Geisler argue that Congress should increase the married filing jointly baseline for applying the Medicare surtax and the net investment income tax, making it double what it is for single taxpayers.

In State Tax Notes, Timothy Noonan, Andrew Wright, and Kristine Bly discuss how cellphones have affected day counts and state tax residency issues when determining tax liability, and which cellular companies provide better data to use in audits. And Jared Walczak argues various forms of rate and benefit recapture create more complex, distorted, and less transparent state income taxes.

And in Tax Notes International, Richard Ainsworth continues his discussion of how Fiji can help New Zealand improve its Netflix tax, which applies to the cross-border supply of services. And Tom O’Shea discusses the CJEU judgement concerning the abuse of exemptions contained in the interest and royalties directive.

And just as a reminder, the Christopher E. Bergin Award for Excellence in Writing competition is currently underway. Please encourage current students to submit their articles before the June 30th deadline for a chance to be published alongside top tax experts. For more information, visit taxnotes.com/contest.

David Stewart: You can read all that and a lot more in April 22nd editions of Tax Notes, State Tax Notes, and Tax Notes International.

That’s it for this week. You can follow me on Twitter @TaxStew, that’s S-T-E-W. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for a future episode you can email us at podcast@taxanalysts.org. And as always, if you like what we’re doing here, please leave a rating or review wherever you download this podcast. We’ll be back next week with another episode of “Tax Notes Talk.”

Tax Analysts Inc. does not provide tax advice or tax preparation services. The information you have seen and heard today represents the views of the presenters, which may not be the same as those of Tax Analysts Inc. It may include information obtained from third parties, and Tax Analysts Inc. makes no warranties or representations of any kind, and is not responsible for any inaccuracies. Nothing in the podcast constitutes legal, accounting, or tax advice. The tax laws change frequently, and neither Tax Analysts Inc. nor the presenters, can guarantee that any information seen or heard is accurate. Also, due to changing tax laws, any information broadcast or downloaded after its original air date may no longer represent the current views of the presenters. If you have any specific questions about any legal or tax matter, you should always consult with your attorney or tax professional. 

All content in this broadcast is protected under U.S. and international laws. Copyright © 2019 Tax Analysts Inc. Unauthorized recording, downloading, copying, retransmitting, or distributing of any part of the podcast is strictly prohibited. All rights reserved.

Copy RID