Dear Friends,

We have a lot of news to share with you, primarily about up and coming events, and published recordings of past events.

First up, we are looking forward to the 8^th International Conference on Taxpayer Rights.  This year’s theme is Access to Justice: Judicial Review & Alternative Dispute Resolution.  It will be held both live-streamed and in-person from May 25-26^th, 2023, with free workshops and roundtable discussions with judges, taxpayers ombuds, and tax clinics on the afternoon of May 24^th.  The in-person event will be held at the University of Chile in Santiago.  We’ve kept the registration fees as low as we can; the virtual option is particularly affordable, and we do have discounts for students.

We have pulled together an extraordinary group of judges and other tax people from all over the world. I’ve been sitting in on the planning sessions this week, and I can honestly say the sessions will be amazing.  You can learn more about the 8^th ICTR and register here; and here is the current agenda.

The second update is about our free ongoing Tax Chat! series, Transforming Tax Administration: Toward an Effective, Trusted, and Inclusive IRS.  As you probably know, the IRS received an unprecedented $80 billion, ten-year appropriation to modernize the agency.  It recently released a high level Strategic Operating Plan discussing how it intended to approach this funding.  The Center for Taxpayer Rights has received funding from Arnold Ventures to hold a series of fifteen or so free, virtual Tax Chats! so we can explore different aspects of what needs to be done to transform the agency.

You can sign up for the free series here; If you’ve already registered for the free series, no need to do so again.

We have a Tax Chat! on the IRS Workforce on Wednesday, 26 April at noon EDT.  Our guests will be Doreen Greenwald, National Vice President of the National Treasury Employees Union;  Prof. Bob Tobias, American University and former member of the IRS Oversight Board; and Lotta Bjorklund Larsen, social anthropologist, of Exeter Business School.  This chat will complete our series of four foundational chats – the first with Charles Rossotti, former IRS Commissioner; the second on the IRS Budget and the appropriations process; and the third on IRS Information Technology Challenges.  We’ve posted the videos of the first two chats here and here; keep checking our You Tube channel for additional videos.

Here’s a view of future Tax Chats!

• 11 May at noon EDT: Increasing and Maintaining Voluntary Compliance with Jim Alm, Tulane University; Stephen Daly, Kings College London; Erich Kirchler, University of Vienna; and Mandi Matlock, Texas RioGrande Legal Aid Low Income Taxpayer Clinic.
  
  
• 30 May at noon EDT: Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and the IRS (Part 1) with Don Fort, Chief Investigator, Kostelanatz LLP and former Chief, IRS Criminal Investigation; Dan Ho, Stanford Law School; and James McTigue of the Government Accountability Officer (GAO).
  
  
• 01 June at noon EDT: Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and the IRS (Part 2) with Josh Blank, University of California, Irvine, School of Law; Cary Coglianese, University of Pennsylvania Law School; and Leigh Osofsky, University of North Carolina School of Law.    Josh, Cary, and Leigh have all authored reports for the Administrative Conference of the United States on use of artificial intelligence and machine learning by government agencies.  We’ve also invited Toon Calders of DigiTax at the University of Antwerp, Belgium.

So, as I said, lots of stuff going on, and there are more Tax Chats! to come.  We hope to see you at the 8^th International Conference on Taxpayer Rights, virtual or otherwise, and at the Tax Chats!

All the best,

Nina

Nina E. Olson
Executive Director