Bob Kerrey: “we would be prepared on this side to accept what I consider to be a very, very good amendment. The idea of this board is…”

“we would be prepared on this side to accept what I consider to be a very, very good amendment. The idea of this board is to give the President authority to select from a wide range of experiences that will assist the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service in managing the agency, and the Commissioner has already indicated--indeed, we are going to help him follow through--his preference to manage the IRS much differently than it currently is. The IRS is currently managed using a three-tiered system that we adopted in 1952. There are regional and district offices, multiple offices, and you have all different kinds of taxpayer needs taken care of in each one of these district offices. What the Commissioner has indicated he wants to do is reorganize along functional lines. Function No. 1 is large business of which I believe there are 7- or 800,000, individual taxpayers would be function No. 2, small business No. 3, and nonprofits No. 4. So what the Commissioner is already attempting to do, and this law would direct him, is to entirely or completely eliminate the three tiers in favor of this kind of functional organization. But what he is already recognizing is that taxpayer needs vary not according to their geography but according to the category of the taxpayer. One of the largest and most important categories of radically different needs than the other three is small business.”