Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Nina E. Olson




Historically when my friends would ask me if I would ever want to serve in public office my response was usually -- "yes, I want to be appointed by the Governor/President as the head of an agency with my job focus to be the closing of my agency" -- now that is my kind of government reform :)

I could always visualize my first day in office when I announced to the staff at 8 am (assuming they were all working by then) that all of them should take the day to prepare/update their resumes because in 3 months the agency would be a footnote in the history books. I would arrange for career counseling and would network with my contacts to find all of these displaced workers jobs in the private or non-profit sectors -- anything but government.

But after seeing CNN interview Ms. Nina Olson this morning perhaps one or two government jobs (for now anyway) are actually necessary. Ms. Olson is the "National Taxpayer Advocate" at the Internal Revenue Service, http://www.irs.gov/advocate/, charged with forcing the IRS to treat taxpayers more like customers versus as tax slaves delivering tribute to the IRS Overlords.

Based on the CNN interview I saw I have to applaud Ms. Olson's work and would hope that all 50 state governments have similar positions within their respective Departments of Revenue.

Customers not slaves,

Todd

2 comments:

Jeff Deitering said...

My office hours are 6:30 to 4. I would have the door unlocked for your arrival.

Anonymous said...

My office hours are 8:30 to 5:00, which roughly translates to 7 ish to 7ish 52 weeks a year.

Thanks Todd for appeciating state government and it's employees who are good stewards to taxpayers money. Believe it or not there are still taxes being paid and services that still need to be rendered.

tar