The Rebuild IRS Initiative: With a Bipartisan Approach to Rebalancing Management Stovepipes and Fixing 'Grass Roots' Field Operations

Abstract

This White Paper offers an achievable breakthrough opportunity and framework for restoring trust to the Internal Revenue Service. It identifies the ill-conceived massive 1998 structural reorganization and division (like salami-slicing) of field operations as a major cause of the IRS’s current downward slide. With that recognition, change-makers can travel a 2015 bipartisan pathway to addressing a wrong-headed 1998 solution to a 1998 non-existent structural problem by introducing a 2015 proposal for a National Office consolidation (slimming down) coupled with a field operations decentralization (closer to customers and ending the practice of absentee senior-management without local accountability). The 1998 restructuring was, at best, a bad idea masterfully executed. At worst, it was a bad idea oversold, overrated and hierarchical making IRS an overly-centralized Washington agency. The 1998 reorganization architects had scrapped a perfectly good structure by eliminating locally-accountable District and replacing them with a headquarters-heavy (and field-light) bureaucracy of unjustifiably divisive stovepipes. To recover from that, presently, IRS can feasibly deliver a range of better practices, especially through refreshingly new, Field Executive Offices (FEOs) (See page 16, infra) run by senior-executive Field Directors, to restore grass roots accountability and a geographic footprint. In sum, that 1998 ill-conceived restructuring can more accurately be seen for what it always was, reversible error and a treatable self-inflicted wound. As prophesized by Brookings and countless independent minded Service insiders, things actually did get worse! So, what now!