Executive Reading: June

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‘Many Unhappy Returns: One Man’s Quest to Turn Around the Most Unpopular Organization in America’
By Charles Rossotti

Reviewed by Margaret Teichert and Oleg Kaganovich

For those of us who spent much of April completing 1040 forms (or, as we call it, a “do-it-yourself mugging”), Charles Rossotti’s memoir, “Many Unhappy Returns,” is an engaging and entirely worthwhile read. That is, once you get past the question of what sane person with a successful career and happy home life would entertain an offer to become Internal Revenue Service Commissioner?
    The job was offered to him in 1997, when national dissatisfaction with the IRS was at an unprecedented high; when Congressional hearings revealed the agency to be both abusive and mind-bogglingly incompetent; when the country had come to the collective realization that this was the largest corporation with the worst customer-service record in the country, possibly the world. And those were just the external woes.
    Internally, the agency’s troubles were almost cartoonishly bad: Its computer systems hadn’t been successfully updated since 1962 (despite some $4.2 billion that had been thrown at the problem,
but for which no one could account).
    It was organized by geography, rather than function; its “customer service” phone lines were perpetually busy; and the workforce was demoralized, to say the least. So much so, that once a batch of late tax returns were found stuffed into the ceiling tiles because some employees were tired of dealing with them.

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