David D. Stewart: Welcome to the podcast. I'm David Stewart, editor in chief of Tax Notes Today International. This week: hearing from the commissioner.

IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel has been leading the agency since March 2023. During this time, the IRS has gotten new funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, seen portions of that funding clawed back, explored the use of artificial intelligence, and opened up a direct-file option for taxpayers. And now, as priorities are likely to change with the transition to a new administration, what can we expect from the IRS?

Tax Notes reporter Benjamin Valdez recently interviewed Commissioner Werfel at IRS headquarters about his tenure and expectations for the future. And one note before we get to the interview: Since we had to leave the studio for this, the audio may sound a bit different than usual.

All right, let's go to that interview.

Benjamin Valdez: Commissioner, thank you for joining us today.

Daniel Werfel: Oh, thank you, Ben. I'm glad to be here.

Benjamin Valdez: It's been almost two years since your confirmation, and since the IRS has been able to start investing Inflation Reduction Act funds into modernization. Looking back at your first few months compared to where we are today, what's an accomplishment that you're proud of?

Daniel Werfel: Well, first of all, I'd start with the fact that at the time that I arrived here, we were coming off of a very challenging filing season and a very challenging moment for the IRS. If you look at where we were in 2022, we had record low levels of service in our call center. A lot of our walk-in centers were shut down, with lines around the block. We had a record high paper backlog coming out of the pandemic. We had stagnation in our technology and anemic audit rates at every level.

And so the first assignment was really to get back to par performance, to get back to historic levels of performance. And so that was the first mandate. I'm very proud of the fact that the team, once we had resources, rebounded so quickly. We infused new hires into the space, started working that paper backlog strategically and effectively, got new phone assisters up on those phone lines, got new staff into those walk-in centers, got them trained up quickly, and started rolling out new technology after years of stagnation.

So I think getting back to historic levels of performance, and in many cases exceeding those levels — that, I think, I'm most proud of from those first few months.

Benjamin Valdez: And how do you hope to build on that momentum as we approach a new filing season?

Daniel Werfel: Well, I think the promise of modernization and having funds at the IRS had two parts to it. One was, let's get back to historic levels of performance. We can't sustain a world in which we have a 20 percent level of service with our phone centers. We can't sustain tax administration with these enormous paper backlogs. So that was part one, but part two was to build an IRS for the future, to modernize in a way that we are caught up with what a 21st-century tax authority needs to look like.

And so as we head into filing season with now two filing seasons under our belt in a row — January to April of '23 and January to April of '24 — where we got back to historic levels of performance and actually exceeded with that momentum, now it's time to not just build on that, but start to show the results that these investments are building: an IRS for the future. And what we have planned for this coming filing season are additional technologies and additional solutions to allow the taxpayer experience to be even more like it feels like when you go on your favorite online bank platform. And that's really the direction. So it should start to move beyond just, "OK, this is traditional IRS services at an effective rate of performance," and it needs to expand to, "They built on that; this is different. Every time I come back to IRS.gov for a new filing season, there's more functionality and there's more ways of engaging the IRS virtually or digitally to do a lot more work with them where I can do it from my tablet or my smartphone."

Benjamin Valdez: And I understand that artificial intelligence has been one of the ways that the agency has been exploring new technology as it modernizes. How is it leveraging AI when it comes to enforcement and those initiatives that you have planned under the strategic operating plan?

Daniel Werfel: Well, AI has a lot of promise and a lot of risk. So I start with a first principle, which is we have to be incredibly cautious and thoughtful and diligent in making sure that we are deploying AI with all the right guardrails. And that means that we look to the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, which guarantees privacy and non-overreach, and that we are adhering to these principles in anything that we do. And I think there's a sense that if we get too forward-leaning on AI, that we'll lose some of the important diligence around the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, and I want to make sure that we're extra cautious on that. So anything we do with AI is definitely a 'measure twice, cut once' prospect — maybe measure five times and cut once for AI.

Now, moving into — look, substantively, I look at AI through the lens of defense and offense, and defense is I worry about how AI could be used by bad actors in the world to compromise the integrity of our tax system, whether they use AI to their advantage to victimize the government's bottom line by stealing money from taxpayers more broadly, or use AI to victimize an individual, whether through identity theft or stealing their refund in some other ways or tricking them into paying a tax debt that doesn't really exist — a phantom tax debt. All of that is emerging as one of the largest challenges and risks to tax administration, not just here in the U.S., but around the world. And so we have to invest in subject matter expertise and even — and maybe even technologies and other things to make sure that we're disrupting the use of AI as a threat to the integrity of the tax system. So that's a big part of our AI strategy going forward.

That's defense. Offense is, how can we use AI to help advance tax administration in a way that also advances the Taxpayer Bill of Rights? One of the plain-language ways of describing our mission, I think are — the fancy version of our mission revolves around supporting taxpayers and meeting their obligations, but a less fancy way of saying it is we want to reduce stress because our tax system can be stressful. Our tax laws are complicated; people don't always know whether they're doing it right or wrong. Doing it wrong has sometimes severe consequences to them. And so we need to do more at the IRS as part of our outreach and our "customer service" to reduce their stress. And if we deploy AI smartly, we can do just that.

And so, how can we do that? Well, for example, I think a big way that AI could be used to help the IRS is by giving our phone assisters and our people in our walk-in centers increasingly more effective tools to answer tough tax questions more quickly. So right now, if you're on the phone as an IRS employee and you get someone on the phone that has a tough question about how to solve a particular challenging tax problem, what our phone assisters are trained to do is to consult something called the Internal Revenue Manual — the IRM — to make sure that we give them the right answer. The IRM is an expansive document that tracks the expansiveness and complexity of our tax laws. And it takes time for phone assisters to learn the IRM and learn how to research it. It's like, if you search it, you're going to get different reference points. To answer this question, you need to read these six different chapters. All of this is happening in real time while we're trying to help a taxpayer.

Well, AI can now take all that information and give you a smart, cogent answer to the question, pulling on all of those references and doing some of the research for you. Now, that assister makes the final decision on what input and what help to provide the caller, the taxpayer, but AI can make this a lot more quick, can give a lot better accuracy to the answer. And if we can solve your problem on the phone in 12 minutes rather than 24 minutes, that means that we're getting to the next call more quickly, and the next call after that.

So here's a way in which AI is advancing smarter, more effective research just out there. It's taken regular internet searches and made them even more honed and more user-friendly. There's no reason why IRS employees can't benefit from the same. So that's an example of — and there's other examples, like chatbots. So you need an answer to a question. The more sophisticated our chat functionality is, our automated chat functionality, the quicker you get your answer. And again, that's less people calling in to talk to a human. And so we see in the private sector and in other public sector organizations the use of AI to accelerate the response using automated features to routine questions. There's no reason why the IRS can't do that and do that effectively.

Benjamin Valdez: You mentioned the goal of reducing stress for taxpayers. I wanted to ask about your efforts to address racial disparity in audit selection following the Stanford University study that found Black taxpayers claiming their earned income tax credit were more likely to be audited than non-Black taxpayers. How has the IRS's work to identify inequities in tax administration evolved, and do you see progress there?

Daniel Werfel: I do. Let me start by saying that a bottom line for the IRS is to build trust with taxpayers and with the broader public. And when you have something like the Stanford report point out and conclude that there's a disparate impact on Black taxpayers in the way in which we were auditing refundable credits — that was the conclusion of the Stanford report — it is very troubling and disheartening because it's the absolute wrong outcome. It's unfair, it's inequitable, and it basically damages our bottom line of building trust with taxpayers. The way in which we can build trust with taxpayers is to demonstrate that the IRS is completely nonpartisan, drives tax administration in a completely equitable manner, that we protect taxpayers' privacy, and I can go on and on. There's a variety of different components of this. And so we have to now repair that trust based on this finding.

So it starts with acknowledging. First thing I wanted to do was basically not be defensive on this. The Stanford report found that the IRS audit procedures were having a disparate impact. That's different than disparate treatment — I think that's really important. The fact is that the IRS, we don't collect race data. We don't know the race of the taxpayers that we are serving or that are filing with us. It's something that — we have just historically have not collected race data for the very reason that we always want to avoid a disparate treatment, because if we don't know the race data, then we — in a really terrible situation where someone in the IRS was inclined to do something like that, they couldn't, because they don't have the race data. But in mapping out an approach for how you're going to carry out tax administration, it could have an unintended impact of having racial disparity. And that's what happened here. And so first thing we had to do was acknowledge that we had a problem and to reach out to impacted communities and own that we have this problem and commit to fix it. And so that's the first step.

The next step was to develop a set of actions, and some of them were born right out of the Stanford report, which was — one of their first suggestions was that one of the drivers of the disparity was the volume, the high number of audits of the earned income tax credit and other refundable credits. So the first thing we committed to was to dramatically reduce the number of those audits, which we have now done.

The second change was to go and look at the, fancy word, algorithm for case selection in this space, to see what changes we could make to the algorithm to eliminate the disparity in the selection of those cases. So we have gone in, we've changed the algorithm based on our best and smartest data scientists working in partnership with external stakeholders to figure out how to change the algorithm to eliminate the disparity. And we've done that, too. And now we're testing that, and we have indicated that we should have results as we head to the end of this calendar year to report, but we're still in the process of testing whether the changes to the algorithms effectively eliminated the disparity.

And I think the third part of the solution is to not assume that this problem may have only been isolated to this one spot of tax administration. We have, as part of our overall strategic operating plan, something called our equity research agenda. And as part of that, we are now looking at other parts of tax administration to see if there's a potential disparity there, as well. We don't want to just assume, and that was significant feedback from the impacted community: They said, "How do we know there aren't disparities beyond the earned income tax credit and other refundable credits?" And we said, "Well, we will commit to a research agenda that starts to test in these other areas."

So all of these are ongoing as part of this principle and this commitment to prioritize equity and tax administration and to make sure the Stanford report is seen as a wake-up call versus something that could be swept under the rug.

Benjamin Valdez: And has the IRA funding given you the ability to do this sort of research and look at this issue more closely?

Daniel Werfel: Yeah, it goes back to this idea of what an adequately or well-funded tax authority can and can't do. I'm a big fan of this metaphor of the IRS being like a train system, and the trains need to run on time. And so that goes back to my earlier point of view: We've got to get back to par performance. That means the trains need to run on time. They can't be broken down; we can't have people waiting on the platforms as the platforms get more and more crowded. And so we need enough funding to make sure that the trains are running on time and we're not leaving people waiting on those platforms and not getting them where they need to go. But we also have to move into more modern approaches so that we're keeping pace with the latest safety regulations, with the latest technologies, because people should be able to see a more real-time train schedule on their smartphones. We need to modernize that customer experience so they know that this train system is keeping pace with what other train systems around the world are.

And all of that is born out of, do we have enough funding to both run the train schedule? So if a train breaks down, does it stay broken down, or do we have funding to repair it? Or if there is a better train on the market that is safer, that is more reliable, that is less likely to break down, do we have enough money for that? Do we have enough money to appropriately hire the right number of trained conductors? Do we have enough money to train those conductors? All of this is really born out of the importance of the tax system and the importance of funding it because the tax system ultimately is a huge part — it's like a keystone of our government and the effectiveness of our government because we collect 97 percent of all the revenue that funds this government.

And if the tax system falters, not only are we not bringing in the resources necessary to fund, whether it's the national defense, safe skies, safe food, safe air, all of that is funded through IRS actions. But also, if we're not funded, that metaphor of leaving people stuck on the platform — or even worse, stuck in a broken-down train in the middle of a track somewhere — that increases the stress of citizens. And a well-functioning IRS where we're answering the phone calls quickly, getting refunds out quickly, answering questions in our walk-in centers, having appointments available for anyone who needs one, putting more and more solutions on smartphones and tablets so people don't have to call us if they don't want, they could do it all digitally, that is all about reducing stress and serving taxpayers, and all of that requires adequate funding.

Benjamin Valdez: So Congress reduced the original funding pool by around $20 billion. Have you seen an impact from that rescission to the IRA funding, and has it affected your modernization efforts?

Daniel Werfel: The biggest impact has been uncertainty, because we were funded originally on a 10-year journey, and now the question becomes, with $20 billion less, can we do everything that we wanted to get done in the 10-year program that was the Inflation Reduction Act? But because we're still relatively early in the Inflation Reduction Act process, the $20 billion that has been rescinded has not yet impacted.

My hope has always been that if we can demonstrate to a broad set of policymakers, budget decision-makers, members of the public, stakeholders, that we are putting this money to really good, effective use in a nonpartisan way — it should be nonpartisan that we are improving customer service. It should be nonpartisan that we are increasingly automating solutions so that an emerging generation of taxpayers can do their business with the IRS remotely, if they choose — virtually, digitally, if they choose. It should be nonpartisan that we are taking the right steps not to collect any more — a penny more — than is owed, but taking the right steps to make sure that we collect the dollars that are owed based on the laws passed by Congress so that we are serving the financial solvency of the United States government as effectively as we can. All of that, I think, should be nonpartisan. And my hope has been that if given enough time to demonstrate the changes that we are making and the positive impact it is having on taxpayers, then that money would be returned, because you want the job to get finished.

I often say the IRS is iconically unpopular. We touch every household, we touch every business, and we're doing something that's not always the most fun thing to do, which is pay your taxes or deal with taxes and your tax obligations. But that doesn't mean that it's not important, and that doesn't mean that we shouldn't create, in what can be a stressful situation, the least stressful version of that situation. And that doesn't mean we shouldn't have the infrastructure to protect from cyberthreats. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't have a well-trained workforce who can give you smart answers to your questions when you call with a problem. It shouldn't mean that we don't have the scanners and the equipment to move increasingly away from paper the way other industries, both private and public sector, have done.

So I do think the $20 billion rescission will ultimately impact, but I'm hopeful that future decision-makers, as we get closer to that impact point, will say, "Let's not go backwards. Let's not slide backwards. Let's continue to move forward."

Benjamin Valdez: We're in the midst of a presidential transition, and I'm just wondering, how does the IRS play a role in that while also continuing its normal operations?

Daniel Werfel: Yeah. Well, I think probably your listeners may know this, but just in case, the IRS was born during the Lincoln presidency. And so we have been going through presidential transitions every four to eight years since the time of the Civil War. So in many ways we are well trained institutionally, culturally, historically, like many other federal agencies, for this moment. It doesn't make it easy; presidential transitions are still hard, even though you've been through a lot of them, because it's a lot of uncertainty.

There's a lot of open questions in terms of, will the priorities shift? Will the funding shift? And so what you do in that moment is you try your best to prepare for a variety of different contingencies so that you can hit the ground running with a new Treasury leadership team in terms of what their IRS priorities are. I like to say that as a nonpartisan entity, the IRS will work as tirelessly on a new Treasury's priorities for the IRS as we have worked for the outgoing Treasury's priorities.

And here's what's the good news: The good news is there's typically a through line. If you go back to the first Trump presidency or the Obama presidency or the Bush presidency before that and you started to track priorities for the IRS, you would find a lot of common denominators. You would find a lot of common themes around improving technology, improving taxpayer experience. So we have some degree of confidence in our planning that a new Treasury team will come in, and the fundamentals of, yes, do we want more phone calls answered? Do we want to serve more people that have questions? Do we want to move increasingly away from paper? Do we want to automate more so that we can answer more questions at midnight because it's on the computer, on IRS.gov, versus in our call centers the next morning?

Typically, the answers to those questions, regardless of who's president or who's the secretary of the Treasury, are yes. But again, we have to plan for a variety of different scenarios, and that's what we're doing, with the goal of hitting the ground running so that we can move to get quick wins for a new Treasury team on what their priorities are.

Benjamin Valdez: Next year the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is set to expire. How is the IRS preparing to, I guess, measure the administrative impact of potential changes to that bill?

Daniel Werfel: Well, one piece of good news is that the investments that we've made at the IRS have moved the ball down the field in terms of our infrastructure. Our technology under the hood is more modern than it was before we were funded. Our data is cleaner and more standard across the IRS than it was. Our business processes are more efficient. Our employees are better trained. As an organization, we are becoming more agile because we're starting to invest in training in agile approaches to the way in which we do logistics, operations, and tech. On all of those, we still have a lot of work to do. I don't want to leave your listeners with any sense that the job is done, but we are at a degree of readiness today that is much better than we were two, three, four years ago.

So the good news is that if Congress and the president enact together a new tax package that has complexity and moving pieces, that we are at a greater state of readiness because of the investments we've made to strengthen the engine under the hood of the IRS. Our role in this is to be agnostic on the policies, but to weigh in on what is operationally feasible. And if we have ideas about how to run this not in a way that is — how to design the tax package in a way that will be easier for the IRS to implement at lower risk, at lower cost, at higher fidelity, but also in a way that will reduce burden on taxpayers and complexity for taxpayers, that's the seat at the table that the IRS typically will have.

And again, we as an organization institutionally have been through a lot of different tax reform moments — sometimes in an emergency like during the pandemic, sometimes with a lot of time to marinate and think through the various changes. I'm hoping this becomes less of an emergency because that will allow us to weigh in and give the decision-makers a better evidence base on how to construct their new tax law in a way that gives us the best chance to implement it effectively.

Benjamin Valdez: You mentioned just the goal of making things easier for taxpayers and just their everyday interactions with the IRS. And I know Direct File was launched earlier this year and it's been made permanent. Several states are now — they're going to be a part of it for next year, with even more expressed interest to do it in future years. What do you envision for the program compared to what it was this year?

Daniel Werfel: I think one of the areas in which there is some excitement about what modern tax could look like is the success of the Direct File pilot. We had an opportunity — and this Treasury Department placed it as a priority — to add an item to the menu for taxpayers and how they file. There is a philosophy in the United States, not shared by all other tax jurisdictions, that taxpayers should have a variety of different ways in which they can file and that each taxpayer should choose the method that's best for them. So in the United States, if you still want to take out that pen and paper or pencil and paper and file that way, you can; or you can hire an accountant, if you have the means, and have them do it for you; or you can buy software on the market; or you can work with a software vendor to see if you're eligible for their free version of their solution.

And there was a growing chorus from taxpayers, tax intermediaries, members of Congress, state government officials that sought a new option where you could file online, direct with the IRS, for free. And so we developed Direct File to respond to that chorus. And in our first year it worked well. It worked very effectively. We got very positive reviews.

And so now we, under this Treasury leadership team, have decided to expand it and are moving this year from 12 states to 24 states. We are working on expanding the number of taxpayers that would be eligible by expanding the scope of different tax scenarios where you could still be a Direct File user, and we're looking to enhance the functionality. I mean, we did well, but there was always — it wasn't A-plus across the board. Some of the taxpayers said, "Oh, you could nip this here, tuck that there." And so we're making some functionality changes, as well. And I think it's an important demonstration that the IRS, as an institution working with partners, is capable of moving in the direction that I described earlier of having an experience as positive and as sophisticated as the online bank experience that you have. Can I do everything with the IRS digitally if I choose? And Direct File represents a change in our technology structure that says we can achieve that if that is a priority and it's well resourced.

Now, I also have to recognize that Direct File is not without its critics, and it's something that I'm aware that putting this solution out there has raised a lot of questions around what the role of the IRS should be in terms of providing this type of solution. Where we stand right now, we built a product, it functioned well, we're rolling it out in the next filing season, and I think next filing season will be another opportunity for policymakers, budgeteers, the new Treasury leadership, others to take a step back and say, "OK, where are we going with this?" But so far the trajectory has been very positive.

Benjamin Valdez: And during your time as commissioner we saw the rise of the false claim that the IRS was hiring 87,000 armed agents to go after taxpayers. What sort of challenge did that present to you to maintain public trust in the IRS while also protecting your employees?

Daniel Werfel: Yeah, it is challenging when there are myths out there that get expounded and repeated. The challenge is to be out there describing in as plain language terms as possible what we're doing with the funds and what we're not doing with the funds. And the reality of the situation is that the Criminal Investigation division of the IRS represents roughly 3 percent of the overall organization. These are individuals that are involved in essentially taking down criminal enterprises. They work with other law enforcement organizations and on crimes like human trafficking, drug trafficking, counterterrorism. The reason why the IRS is involved is because often law enforcement comes together and determines the best way to get that search warrant, the best way to disrupt that criminal enterprise, is through potential tax crimes. And we have a team at the IRS in our criminal investigative unit that is expert at doing that. And if you are sending an IRS agent into a situation where there are known drug traffickers, known human traffickers, known organized crime elements, known connections to terrorism, and you're sending them in to serve a warrant of some kind, it would be malpractice to do it without them being armed.

So there are armed IRS agents. It represents literally 3 percent or less of the entire IRS workforce. It is in very unique circumstances that they would actually require a firearm — only when there is this type of significant criminal threat and threat to life and safety. I think it's important for the public to recognize this work and understand how important it is and that it's saving lives. So it's the exact opposite of what the story is out there: You want these people to be taking down these criminal enterprises that are representing a threat to your communities, to your families, to your children, and to your friends. And so they should take comfort knowing that there is a network of law enforcement agents, the IRS being part of it, that is doing what they can to protect Americans and protect their safety.

If you are an average taxpayer, there's no situation in which you would be engaged with an armed IRS person. "Armed only with a calculator, maybe," is what I like to say.

Benjamin Valdez: Do you see yourself serving out the remainder of your term, which ends in 2027?

Daniel Werfel: I do. I have a vision of my last day on the job being November 12, 2027, which is by statute the last day of my term, looking around the office and realizing probably that there was a lot more to learn and a lot more to get done. My frame of mind on the IRS is that it's nonpartisan, is that our priorities can and should shift with new Treasury leadership, but that any IRS commissioner and team, as I said earlier, is prepared to work as tirelessly on a new Treasury leadership's priorities as the previous, and that there's usually a through line there.

I think we have really good momentum at the IRS in terms of the changes that we're making to strengthen that engine under the hood, to strengthen our train system, if you will. There's a lot more work to be done. And given that I signed up to be as helpful as I can for five years, my hope and my frame of reference is if I started to think that that wasn't the case, I want to make sure that none of those thoughts would ever impede my judgment on what the right things and the right changes to make long and short term [are].

So in my mind, I'm here through November 2027 and want to run the future course of the IRS through that lens — but again, awaiting a new Treasury team and awaiting what priorities they have for the IRS and for the future of tax administration and being here to make sure that with continuity and with effectiveness, we glide right into a new set of priorities so that we can hit the ground running.

Benjamin Valdez: What are some of the biggest lessons that you've learned so far in your time as commissioner?

Daniel Werfel: Well, so many — probably too many to mention, because this is an extremely, extremely rewarding and challenging job and has tested my leadership skills and abilities and instincts and understandings in ways that were hard to envision when I got here. I would say that one of the things that has surprised me about the IRS is because of the hiring that we have done — I was here as the acting commissioner in 2013, and back then I would joke that if you run into someone at the IRS, you say, "Hi, how long have you worked at the IRS?" They would say, "I'm new; I've been here 12 years," because that was the mindset for many, many years — that you were new at the IRS until you had been here for more than a decade. But today it's very different. Today, the IRS, we have a lot of new employees, and when I go around the country meeting with them, very often, when I meet and greet, people will tell me that it's their first day, or they've been here a month, or they've been here less than 18 months.

It's a new generation. Just like it's a new generation or an emerging generation of taxpayers, it's a new generation of IRS employees, and they have the opportunity to be not just culture carriers, but culture creators. So we have an opportunity and a challenge to shape a new culture at the IRS built on the backs of this emerging generation of new employees that's fit to purpose for where we are in the 21st century, that understands the important role that technology can play, that increasingly understands the importance of empathy when dealing with taxpayers on the other side of the phone or the other side of the desk or the other side of a screen, that understands that the IRS can't do tax administration alone, that we have to be partners.

I mean, one of the interesting learning moments, it was early: I was at a conference with all the state tax administrators, so a lot of state tax commissioners in the room, and I said something that I thought was an innocent comment, but it ended up getting a standing ovation essentially, or a large round of applause, which was, I said, "We don't, at the IRS, don't always have the answer. We can look to you, the states, who are administering tax systems at the state level. You have things that can teach us." And this was shocking to hear.

For me it was a learning moment to understand that we do have this responsibility to create partnerships with other people that make this tax ecosystem work effectively — not just state tax administrators, but accountants, lawyers, tax preparers, tax pros, software vendors, the media. All of us play a role in driving a healthy and effective tax system, and the IRS should not have the mindset that we have the monopoly on the right answer. We have to have a mindset of collaboration, the willingness to course correct, the willingness to own when we make mistakes and to increasingly embrace a taxpayer-first, a taxpayer-centric approach. And I think we have an opportunity — I think up and down the line, whether you've been here for 30 years or 30 days, I think there's general agreement with those principles. But to take us fully on that course, I think this new generation of IRS employees will help us get there even more.

Benjamin Valdez: Well, commissioner, thank you so much for your time.

Daniel Werfel: It's been my pleasure. Anytime. As I mentioned, the press, the media, organizations like yours who are getting important information out there to taxpayers, it's a critical part of what we do, and the IRS looks forward to that kind of relationship continuing to be positive and grow in fruition in the future.

David D. Stewart: And now, coming attractions. Each week we highlight new and interesting commentary in our magazines. Joining me now is Acquisitions and Engagement Editor in Chief Paige Jones. Paige, what will you have for us?

Paige Jones: Thanks, Dave. Instead of Coming Attractions this week, we have a special announcement: The submissions period for the Tax Notes Student Writing Competition is now open. This annual award recognizes superior student writing on unsettled questions in tax law or policy. Eligible students must be enrolled in an accredited undergraduate or graduate program during the academic year. Visit taxnotes.com/students for more details.

David D. Stewart: That's it for this week. You can follow me online @TaxStew, that's S-T-E-W. And be sure to follow @TaxNotes for all things tax. 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.

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