Do you have what it takes to run the IRS? You may be in luck. Doug Shulman, the current Commissioner of the IRS, announced during a Q and A at the National Press Club that he would not continue to serve past his five-year term which ends in November.
While no IRS Commissioner has served more than five years, it was apparent that was where Shulman was headed. His annual speech was filled with a list of the IRS’ achievements – and shortfalls – since he took office in 2008.
The IRS Commissioner, as Shulman noted, manages 100,000 employees and processes over $2.5 trillion annually for over 200 million individuals, businesses, and non-profits. That level of employee management is pretty impressive: according to the Census, fewer than 1,000 U.S. companies even come close to those kinds of numbers, puts it on par with Marriott, GM, and Starbucks and well ahead of Apple and Microsoft.
In his annual speech, Shulman noted that the government had a “real reluctance to fund IRS technology in a way that is commensurate with its mission.” Shulman pointed out that IRS expenditures on long term enhancements to IT were less than 3%, a number that is “shockingly low” compared to the private sector. In what was perhaps a slap on the hand of Congress, Shulman pointed out that the President has proposed a much-needed substantial increase in the IRS technology budget; that budget has not been approved.
Shulman also touted the new requirements for tax return preparers which moved forward on his watch. Under the new rules, the IRS has registered over 840,000 return preparers and have begun administering a competency test for any preparer who is not a CPA, attorney or enrolled agent.
And while customer service likely isn’t the first thing you think of when you think of IRS, Shulman emphasized that providing quality customer service has been a key priority during his administration. When he took office in 1998, only 32% of taxpayers responding to an American Customer Satisfaction Index survey indicated that the IRS was doing a satisfactory job. Last year, that number has jumped to 73% – the highest score ever for the IRS. Those numbers mean that more folks believe that IRS performed a satisfactory job in 2011 than such companies as Bank of America, Facebook, USAirways, or Comcast.
There has been a corresponding jump in employee satisfaction with Shulman reporting that during his tenure, the IRS has earned kudos for being a good place to work (yes, you read that correctly). From 2008 to 2011, the IRS moved from 8th place to 3rd place among the fifteen large agencies with over 20,000 employees in the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government survey.
The IRS has also become faster and more efficient at processing tax returns. E-filing is, of course, at the center of that transition with Shulman claiming that it costs only about 15 cents to process an e-filed return compared to approximately $3.50 to process a paper return. Taxpayers get their tax refunds faster with e-file with fewer processing errors.
And, of course, the crown jewel in Shulman’s tenure has been the increase in the crackdown on offshore tax evasion. Shulman took the opportunity to remark on the results of the ramped-up focus on offshore tax evasion. Particularly, he pointed to the crack in the Swiss banking secrecy laws, the first time that has happened in history. Under the most recent voluntary disclosure programs, 33,000 voluntary disclosures from individuals brought in $4.4 billion – a number that is expected to grow.
Shulman ended by talking about the need to react quickly to “whatever the future may hold.”
It felt like a goodbye. And it turns out that it was.
