Editor’s note: This story was updated on March 4 with a statement from the Treasury Department.
Marjorie Rollinson, a tax lawyer and former high-ranking IRS legal adviser, is returning to the agency as chief legal counsel, the Senate confirmed in a vote on Thursday.
She is the first woman to hold the position and most recently retired from Ernst & Young, a consulting firm. Prior to that, she was an associate chief counsel at the IRS and led a team of 100 lawyers to provide the agency with technical expertise on implementation of its tax rules, according to the White House.
In a 56-41 vote along party lines, senators approved President Joe Biden’s nomination for the post and filled a critical position within an agency that is expecting to overhaul nearly every aspect of the way it collects taxpayer dollars after years of underfunding, lagging tech and workforce shortages.
“The Treasury Department is pleased to see the Senate confirm Marjorie Rollinson to the key post of IRS Chief Counsel with bipartisan support,” said Haris Talwar, spokesperson at the department. “With decades of experience in the private and public sectors, including at the IRS, she will hit the ground running. As IRS Chief Counsel, Marjorie will play a critical role in ensuring the fair and effective implementation of our tax laws as well as in our efforts to modernize the IRS over the next several years.”
Rollinson will jointly serve as an assistant general counsel of the larger Department of the Treasury and help ensure the agency adheres to tax law. Today, that’s a more complicated job than it was in 1955 when the tax code was a sixth of its current length.
“She’s also going to play another important role in terms of tax enforcement,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., on the floor Thursday. “We want to do it by the book, so it’s not just low-income families that get audited, but everybody who is skirting the law should be subject to equal treatment under the law. It is a matter of basic fairness with respect to audits, and Ms. Rollinson will handle that in the right fashion.”
William Paul has been serving as acting chief counsel of the IRS after the previous official, Michael Desmond, a Trump-administration appointee, resigned in 2021. In June last year, the White House nominated Rollinson.
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Bracing for funding cuts at the hands of Republicans who have threatened to recuperate some of the $80 billion the IRS is promised over the next decade by the Inflation Reduction Act, the agency has been very vocal about what it’s doing to improve taxpayer services and crack down on wealthy tax cheats. In January, officials told reporters that they collected an additional $360 million in overdue taxes from millionaires and will continue to target high-earners who evade the IRS. To do this, the agency is hoping it can retain funds from the IRA to continue staffing its offices and staying on top of returns processing, especially during filing season, which this year began on Jan. 29. In 2022, the IRS processed more than 260 million returns.
At her nomination hearing in October, Rollinson vowed to seek resources for the Office of Chief Counsel to litigate cases of tax evasion, but also to treat cases with the individual attention they may need in order to reflect the oft-complicated nature of personal and business finances.
“It is essential that our tax system operate fairly and, right now, there is evidence that a significant number of high earners, large corporations, and complex partnerships are not paying the taxes they legally owe,” she testified at the time before the Senate Committee on Finance. “This outcome erodes public trust in our tax system because honest taxpayers should know that when they file their taxes, everyone else – regardless of their income – is doing the same.”
Rollinson received her undergraduate degree from Wellesley College in 1984 and her law degree from the University of Maryland School of Law in 1987.
The IRS also has a newly confirmed commissioner. Danny Werfel took up the post nearly a year ago and has led the agency through its Strategic Operating Plan aligned with IRA funds.
Molly Weisner is a staff reporter for Federal Times where she covers labor, policy and contracting pertaining to the government workforce. She made previous stops at USA Today and McClatchy as a digital producer, and worked at The New York Times as a copy editor. Molly majored in journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
