Originally published on Forbes.com Aug 7th, 2014
William Hoffman’s interview of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen last week caught attention mainly because of the Commissioner’s comment that Congressional investigators will never be satisfied with the documents that they have received, because they really don’t want it to end.
Well, there were all these things we could never quite get a straight story, to some extent because there are some people who don’t want a straight story. They don’t want this to end.
All of the e-mails we’re talking about, with regard to Lois’s hard drive crash or lost e-mails, have been provided in the ordinary course of the production. So if the investigators, across the board, had read the documents they’ve been insisting we provide, they would’ve known about the hard drive crash about the same time we did.
That is not what I found most interesting about the interview. What I found more interesting was his vision of the IRS as an organization. The most surprising comment was on the revolving door of people moving from working for the IRS to tax practice. Mr. Koskinen believes that the revolving door is a feature not a bug.
It is important to remember that Mr. Koskinen is new to the IRS and new to the tax world for that matter. He is someone who has a reputation for turning large organizations around. He came out of retirement to take on what will most likely be his final challenge. The job has a five year term and he turned 75 on July 30. Happy birthday, Commissioner. A story in the New York Times notes that:
Mr. Koskinen’s style — quick-witted to the point of being flip and sometimes impolitic — has left some wondering if he is the right person to restore the I.R.S.’s battered credibility.
I’m impressed with Mr. Koskinen’s commitment to training, in spite of the resource constraints the agency will be operating under.
So anyway, as I say, we’ll play the hand we’re dealt, but part of the way to deal with the morale is that we’re going to train people so they feel comfortable and they know what they’re doing. New people will get trained. So I’m going to get yelled at: “Gee, if you’re out of money, why are you spending all this money on training?” And the answer is if we don’t train them, it’s not going to be a good result for the taxpayer or the government.
Which brings us to the revolving door, which he sees as a feature, not a bug.
So my thought is if you run a program not willing to have people come and learn and go, you want them all to stay so they don’t have an option. I’ve always said if you run an organization and nobody recruits your people, you’ve got a problem because that means you haven’t developed people anybody wants. You’ve neither recruited them or trained them or developed them.
So I’ve always said the best testimonial to a good place to work is people are forever coming in and trying to steal your people. And so I would be delighted to have young people come here for two or three years and some of them get recruited away because they were so good and the training is so good, because the more of that that happens, the more people are going to stand in line to get here. And as I say, the experience is, because it would be a great place to work, is the capture rate would be terrific.
So there’d be some turnover. There’s always turnover in all organizations. Financial institutions turn over 10 percent of people a year, and that’s fine because the ones that stay, the 90 percent that don’t turn over, they’ll a great cadre of people. And that’s the history. When you go around and talk to these people who’ve been here 15 or 20 or 25 years, they are spectacular people.
The IRS is being called on to do more and more with less and less, Mr. Koskinen’s approach is to keep beating that drum and let Congress experience the results of its choices.
So anyway, I’m — it’s you or somebody noted, every time you hear from me, it’s talking about the impact of the cuts. But it’s partially because the Congress has never had to take responsibility for the ramifications of cuts. They — because we keep showing up, running filing season, and the place looks like it’s running; it’s just corroding underneath. And my view is if we have enough momentum and we have good enough people that I could probably get through my term without paying too much more attention to it, but you would have a shell, and whoever is next in line would look at it and say, “Wow, people have retired, we don’t have new people in, we haven’t trained the workforce appropriately. The IT looks crummy. We’ve run filing season every year, but this place is about to collapse,” and my view is, no reason I should do that.
One comment that makes me suspect that Mr. Koskinen might be the right guy for the job is this.
I was telling somebody earlier, my experience in organizational turnarounds is that people are never the problem. It’s the structure, the leadership, the resources you’re given. This is the best workforce I’ve ever been associated with at the front end of a start-up, and it’s because there’s a mission.
It reminds me of a quote I have seen in various forms about the military, which my cursory research indicates is attributed to Napoleon – “There are no bad soldiers, only bad officers.”
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