May 18, 2000 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The Internal Revenue Service’s continuing reorganization is helping the agency strengthen its charity-regulation efforts, according to Steve Miller, the first director of the service’s new Exempt Organizations office.
The revenue service is consolidating its bureaucracy into just four units, one of which, the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division, is focusing on charity regulation and other matters.
Mr. Miller, whose office is part of the new division, said that the restructuring is giving a higher profile and more clout to charity regulators who have always had to struggle with other I.R.S. offices for budget money.
“We are already seeing the benefits of our heightened identity within the service,” he said. “We’re no longer the poor stepchild that had to be represented by three lines of management at meetings arguing for resources. We’re at the table.”
What’s more, Mr. Miller said, “the amount of cooperation between Congress and the service is on the upswing,” in part because members of Congress have “a lot of respect” for the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, Charles O. Rossotti, and for his efforts to reorganize the agency. “What that translates to for us [in exempt organizations] is a better budget, and that’s a very meaningful change from past years,” said Mr. Miller.
In fact, Mr. Miller said, for the first time in years the I.R.S. is starting to hire a significant number of new workers in its charity-regulation departments — including accountants and lawyers in the office that issues rulings and guidelines.
Meanwhile, as part of the reorganization, the I.R.S. is in the final stages of creating an Office of Customer Education and Outreach to help non-profit groups understand the law, Mr. Miller said. Goals of the office will include producing more “plain-language publications” to explain tax statutes and regulation to charities, and making the exempt-organizations’ section of the I.R.S.’s Web site “more user friendly, more informative, and more efficient to get to.”
Mr. Miller spoke at a conference held by Georgetown University Law Center’s Continuing Legal Education Program.
