Running head: TRANSFORMATION AT THE IRS

Transformation at the IRS
Antonio D. Tancredi, Isaac Trinidad, John Rodgers
Stacey Cotton Matthews, Steven Gill
Grand Canyon University
AMP-492
January 28, 2012

Transformation at the IRS
The manager may have the power to change an organization’s policies with the stroke of a pen but changing a deep-rooted culture may be the managers’ toughest task. Commissioner Charles Rossotti realized the task before him and the commitment it would take to produce the necessary changes at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Rossotti had to win the hearts and minds of the people that work at the IRS, politicians, and the American People to convince them that his proposed changes would produce a
Another reason why many people did not believe that a change so immense could become a reality in the IRS was because in 1986 a modernization initiative was launched named the Tax Systems Redesigns (TSR) project, but ten years past and $4 billion spent no real change occurred. So when Charles Rossotti proposed the overhaul in 1997 for the IRS many doubt his ability to formulate the transformation of a large government department into a flat organization that could compete with similar corporations of the private sector.
Kotter’s 8 Step to Change model consists of creating urgency, forming a powerful coalition, creating a vision for change, communicating a vision, removing obstacles, create short-term wins, and build on the change. Kotter’s 8 Step to change appeared to have been utilized when Commissioner Rossetti identified five levels of change and applied them. Another way to assist in the Transformation of the IRS was to remove obstacles by removing management that would not adhere to change, and re hire new management with new business practices.
The reason for considering outsourcing was due to the “increasingly overly burdened IRS collection resources” (Resnick, 2005). There were a number of factors that contributed to the need of outsourcing such as from “1992 through 2001 the workload increased by 16%, the number of employees decreased by