Tax Notes Federal Persons of the Year:
Dorothy Brown, Champion for Change: Dorothy Brown reflects on her time spent serving as a member of the Treasury Advisory Committee on Racial Equity and the committee’s ultimate success in advocating for Treasury to release regulations on sharing more data with the Census Bureau to help conduct critical tax analysis.
Dorothy Brown isn’t afraid to speak her mind, and that’s exactly what she’s done this year to expedite Treasury’s progress on addressing racial inequities in the U.S. tax code.
“Treasury is an agency that’s run amok,” Brown told Tax Notes November 22 in her office at Georgetown University Law Center. “They do what they want, when they want, however they want, and nobody, apparently, has the guts to say, ‘We’re going in a different way.’”
Brown, a renowned academic and author of The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans — And How We Can Fix It, has been a high-profile advocate of Treasury collecting and sharing statistics on tax and race with the U.S. Census Bureau.
“If you want to talk about tax analysis, you’ve got to have the race and class data. People need to see who’s getting loopholes and who’s getting shut out of loopholes,” said Brown, who serves as the Martin D. Ginsburg Chair in Taxation at Georgetown Law.
2. The Supreme Court: Marie Sapirie reviews several high-profile cases from the Supreme Court in 2024 and considers how their decisions will affect the future of tax law.
3. Daniel Werfel. Steered Modernization Effort: The Senate confirmed IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel about seven months after the agency received a massive infusion of funding from President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Tasked with stewarding the IRS through a historic modernization effort, he embraced the challenge.
Tax Notes International Persons of the Year:
1. Melani Dewi Astuti: Learning From the Past; Shaping Indonesia’s Future
2. Achim Pross, Deputy Director, OECD Centre for Tax Policy and Administration
3. Eugene Rossiter, Justice, Tax Court of Canada
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