Margaret Richardson, IRS commissioner during Clinton’s first term, dies at 78 - The Washington Post

istilahni.blogspot.com

JOHN DURICKA AP

Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Margaret Richardson, left, and Deputy Commissioner Michael Dolan, right, testify on Capitol Hill in 1993.

Margaret “Peggy” Richardson, a Washington tax lawyer who became commissioner of internal revenue during President Bill Clinton’s first term and was the second woman to serve as the nation’s chief tax collector, died July 13 at her home in Delaplane, Va. She was 78.

The cause was complications from lung cancer, said her daughter, Margaret L. Richardson.

The daughter of an Army colonel, Mrs. Richardson grew up in Waco, Tex., and at West Point, N.Y., before attending Vassar College, an elite all-women’s school, and becoming a specialist in tax and insurance regulatory law.

She ascended the ranks of the Internal Revenue Service early in her career, became a partner at prominent Washington law firm Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, and maintained an extensive Rolodex that she put to productive use fundraising for Clinton during his 1992 presidential campaign.

She had befriended future first lady Hillary Clinton when both were among the few young female lawyers working on American Bar Association initiatives. After Bill Clinton took office in 1993, Mrs. Richardson became IRS chief, succeeding the first woman to hold the role, Shirley D. Peterson.

Friends and colleagues warned Mrs. Richardson not to take the job, which they worried would make her a political bull’s eye. She said she was undaunted and in fact eager to repair the reputation of a much-detested agency essential to the country’s operation.

“Going back through recorded history, people who collected taxes weren’t popular,” she told the Chicago Tribune in 1996. “We are one agency of government that touches the lives of everyone and are [a] surrogate for people’s frustration with all levels of government.”

She added that the agency often absorbed broad fears about Washington’s power. She recounted that at a gathering of small-business owners in Helena, Mont., a man rose and declared: “You have to understand, we folks out here don’t like big government. We like small government.”

He proceeded to plead for the IRS to maintain a local office, which he perceived as “small government.”

A problem that haunted Mrs. Richardson’s tenure was the agency’s decade-long, multibillion-dollar effort to modernize antiquated and overburdened computer and data-processing systems to electronically scan and store tax forms. Some of the technology dated to the 1960s.

Among tax experts, the New York Times reported, Mrs. Richardson was regarded as having “performed competently, especially in her efforts to improve compliance with tax law.” But her inability to improve the agency’s technology ultimately dented confidence in her leadership.

Furthermore, as taxpayers came forward with horror stories about the IRS being overly aggressive in its audits and unresponsive to complaints, the Republican-led Congress reduced agency funding. In the 1996 presidential election, several candidates on the right called for the IRS’s abolition.

After leaving the IRS in 1997, Mrs. Richardson spent several years practicing tax law at accounting firm Ernst & Young. She also served on the boards of Legg Mason, an asset management company, Jackson Hewitt Tax Service and the Washington-area public TV station WETA.

Mary Margaret Milner was born in Waco on May 14, 1943. Her mother was an English teacher.

She received a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1965 from Vassar in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and graduated in 1968 from George Washington University’s law school, where she was an editor on the law review.

She subsequently spent eight years working in the IRS’s Office of Chief Counsel, where she became director of the administrative services division. She joined the law firm Sutherland Asbill & Brennan in 1977, making partner three years later. She also served on the IRS Commissioner’s Advisory Group, an organization of tax professionals, from 1988 to 1990, chairing the group in 1990.

She married John L. Richardson, a transportation lawyer, in 1967. In addition to her husband, of Delaplane, and daughter of Oakland, Calif., survivors include three grandchildren.

Mrs. Richardson took wry pleasure in observing the effect on her social life of her appointment as chief tax collector. On airplanes, she said, she could quickly shut down the annoying small talk of prolix seatmates when they asked, “What do you do?”

On occasion, she said, fellow guests at parties assumed her husband was the IRS chief. She told The Washington Post she was content to let that impression linger.

“If they’re not happy with what’s happened to their taxes,” she added, “I’ve been known to walk away and let him talk to them.”