How the IRS Dirty Dozen Was Created | Terry Lemons, 26+ Years at the IRS

[Cold open]

TERRY LEMONS: I found it fascinating to be able to go in and not just write about the news as a reporter, but actually go inside the agency and help make the news.

ALEX POWELL: Welcome to Cited Authorities. I’m your host, Alexander Powell. My guest today is Terry Lemons, Director of Public Relations at Frost Law and former Chief of Communications at the IRS. Terry spent more than 26 years at the IRS, including 11 years leading communications for the agency. Before government, Terry was a newspaper reporter covering Congress and the White House. He’s also the author of a new book, The Year St. Louis Became a Baseball Town. Here’s the cover of the book here on a postcard that Terry sent me. It’s available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, as well as retail outlets in the Midwest. Terry, thanks for joining me today.

TERRY LEMONS: Thanks for having me, Alex.

ALEX POWELL: I want to start with your career as a reporter and what you learned on the campaign trail and covering institutions from the outside.

TERRY LEMONS: I had a really interesting ringside seat to a lot of different things early in my career as a newspaper reporter. I started out in Missouri, wound up in Arkansas. There was this guy named Bill Clinton in the 1990s who had interest in running for the White House, and I was able to get in on the ground floor of covering the 1992 presidential campaign. And that eventually took me to Washington, where I was able to cover Congress and the White House and all things Arkansas for the statewide newspaper down there.

It also gave me a really interesting perspective on how government and politics work. I learned a lot about public relations and communications, watching some of those experts for the Clinton and Bush campaigns focus on messaging, getting their person out and dealing with crowds. And then when I came to Washington, I learned more about the inside operations of government as a reporter, walking the halls of Congress and sitting in the briefing room of the White House. So it really prepared me quite well for when I jumped ship and joined the IRS.

ALEX POWELL: When you first started covering the Clinton campaign, I imagine he was not the Democratic nominee at that point.

TERRY LEMONS: That’s right. 1991 was when he kicked off his campaign, and it was an interesting scenario for the Democrats that year. You had a sitting president in George Bush, George H.W. Bush. The Democrats had an interesting choice there, basically to take on a sitting incumbent president, and that’s historically a very hard thing to do, is to topple an incumbent president. But it was a pretty lively Democratic field. And Bill Clinton was one of the original front-runners, and it was quite a roller coaster ride watching his campaign develop. He’s an amazing retail politician in terms of being able to connect with people that he actually personally meets. It was a fascinating primary campaign. He had good advisors. He was really good on the ground, really good with debates and things like that. And he emerged as the Democratic nominee. As things turned in 1992, the economy was struggling. In essence, Bill Clinton did what many people can’t do, and that was he defeated an incumbent president running for reelection.

ALEX POWELL: You then made your move inside government in Washington at the IRS. What surprised you most when you took that job?

TERRY LEMONS: I was at an intersection of my career in 1998. The Clinton administration only had a couple more years to go. I saw changes taking place in both newspapers and the communications world. So I had kind of a choice to make. Was I going to stick with the newspaper industry and try to find another job, maybe at another newspaper somewhere, a smaller job, and spend another 10 years kind of working up to cover what I did during the Clinton administration? Or was I going to reinvent myself? I saw a number of older reporters getting shown the curb because they had become too expensive to pay. If you overlay that personal backdrop with babies starting to come in the household, the reporter hours weren’t that good, and honestly, the benefits weren’t as good as other places.

As it so happened, in 1998 the IRS had really taken a beating at the Roth hearings in the Senate Finance Committee. A lot of discussion about abuse at the IRS. Some of those stories were later disproven, but it was a very tough time for the IRS. And I heard along the grapevine that they were looking for somebody to help with their public relations. I ended up putting in an application, and as it turns out, they had nobody with media background in their press shop. So I was able to get hired and really filled a unique niche in the communications operation at the IRS when I first came in.

I found a lot of the tools that I used as a reporter worked really well with the IRS. Number one, the ability to write and translate complex topics. That was something at the IRS. It’s as complex a place as you’re ever gonna find in terms of tax law and things like that. So those writing skills really came in handy in terms of being able to write news releases in plain language, so that taxpayers could understand it, as well as reporters. Reporters aren’t necessarily tax experts, especially mainstream reporters. They maybe cover taxes during tax season or as a sidelight. So I was able to use those communications skills that I picked up as a reporter as my core skillset at the IRS. But I also discovered when I joined the IRS, I had a lot of tools there that I wasn’t really using as a reporter. And I found it fascinating to be able to go in and not just write about the news as a reporter, but actually go inside the agency and help make the news.

ALEX POWELL: What do you mean by that?

TERRY LEMONS: Well, in essence, if you’re a reporter, you’re simply reflecting what’s going on in government or sports or whatever you’re covering. But if you’re inside a government agency, or if you’re inside a company and you get into a leadership role or a position where you can influence things, you’re actually helping influence the course of bigger issues beyond just simply reflecting what others are doing.

So for me, when I came in, in 1998, 1999, 2000, the IRS was going through a reorganization that stemmed from the Roth hearings in 1998. And I was able to basically help internally figure out ways of describing those changes and help build support for some of the changes that were going on. And those are really important when you’re out talking with the tax professional community, the legal community, Congress, as well as other partners out in the public space.

ALEX POWELL: For our listeners who might not be aware, you started the Dirty Dozen. And that’s one of the IRS communications that people recognize year to year, because it uses plain language and messaging to get across to the American people what the priorities of the service are at that point in time.

TERRY LEMONS: One of the biggest challenges at the IRS is being able to make tax news relevant for average people. Early on, I discovered that there were a lot of tax scams out there. And some of our public relations specialists talked about that a lot, and a couple of them had done small listings of scams. In the early two thousands, we were seeing several different scams that were really taking on additional national attention. At that point, I had moved into management. I was running the press shop at that point. It was my first promotion of my career. And it struck me that there were enough of these scams going that it would be really helpful for the national media and for taxpayers in the tax community to be able to see a convenient list of these. So what I did was I branded it, and basically went back to that old movie called The Dirty Dozen, and came up with 12 tax scams. It really worked out well from a public relations standpoint. It also helped us get our messaging out to a wider community. And that was back in about 2002 when we first started it.

It became an annual listing, and through the years the topics changed, but it’s still quite relevant. I’m really happy the IRS team continued it after I left, because right now, especially in this era of social media, it’s really hard for people to get accurate tax information. There’s a lot of bad information being spread out in social media, and the scammers take advantage of it. And the Dirty Dozen has been a really effective tool for the IRS to get the word out about some of these tax scams.

ALEX POWELL: Right. It seems so easy for everyday Americans to get caught up, like you said, with social media, to see something on Instagram or Facebook or whatever it is. They’ll think to themselves, well, they’re strapped for cash, they have a difficult time affording to pay taxes. Oh, this person who seems to have this air of credibility, I’ll try this, because their back is against the wall. When that is opening themselves up to civil liability, if not criminal liability.

TERRY LEMONS: Yeah, that’s one of the things that continues to amaze me. Filing the tax return, and that tax refund, for a lot of people is the biggest single financial transaction they make all year. That refund check comes in over $3,000. For some people it’s even more than that. What you’ve got are a lot of people who really need that check. I mean, I know when I was a kid growing up in St. Louis, my mom was putting herself through nursing school, and man, you’d check the mailbox every day to see if that refund check came through. It was long before the days of e-filing. But I just think it’s really tempting for people to get lured in by these. And let’s face it, tax issues are not simple. People can be overwhelmed by it. And it really creates a fertile breeding ground for these scammers and TikTok influencers to go out there and suggest things. The thing that’s really haywire from my standpoint is that the people that are out there promoting it on TikTok and some of these other places, they may not even be doing it themselves, but it’s getting them clicks, it’s getting them views, and it has a monetary component for them. So there’s a lot of really negative disincentives, and unfortunately the average taxpayer out there can get hooked on these scams.

ALEX POWELL: Terry, I do want to go back in time. You were the Washington Bureau Chief for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. What drew you to journalism?

TERRY LEMONS: I grew up in a household that had a rule, and that rule was, if you wanted to watch the news, that was what channel the TV got turned to. Didn’t matter what else was on. If anybody in the house wanted to watch the news, that’s what happened. And I was also in a household where newspapers were around a lot. I enjoyed reading a lot as a kid, and I was drawn by current events. And actually, I really enjoyed movies a lot, and that pulled me into my old high school newspaper to do movie reviews. Eventually, when it came time to go to college, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do, so I put down journalism as my eventual destination, and I figured once I got into college, I’d figure something out. But I’ve just always found the writing thing interesting. And once I really started reporting, I found it fascinating that I could get paid to go out and talk to interesting people, and then write about what I saw. It was a really intriguing thing for me, and it just had a lot of allure, and I enjoy writing. So that’s kind of what pulled me into it.

The other thing is I’ve always been kind of a political junkie through the years. When I was a kid, there was a game called Landslide, which was about presidential elections, and you had to go around and pick up states, you got cards with votes on them. I mean, it was a very geeky kind of thing for a grade schooler to be into. But I found it fascinating, in some of the presidential elections, the math going into the whole thing. So that interest in politics also was another strong pull that had me gravitate towards journalism.

ALEX POWELL: Who was your favorite broadcaster when you were a kid?

TERRY LEMONS: That’s a great question. I mean, Walter Cronkite was there, but I really kind of grew up in an NBC household, so Huntley and Brinkley were on quite a bit when I was a kid. And I certainly enjoyed David Brinkley when he moved over to ABC and he did This Week. He wrote one of my favorite books called Washington at War, which is a look at what Washington, D.C. went through during the World War II period. And that book for me really told me a lot about the modern-day Washington, D.C., and really how the city and Congress itself kind of built a lot of things that still carry on today.

ALEX POWELL: A sleepy southern town before the war.

TERRY LEMONS: Exactly, exactly. And then you have basically a village popping up on the National Mall, you have the Pentagon being built. Just all across town, they were trying to find places to put people so they could basically work and support the war effort. It was a fascinating period in Washington.

ALEX POWELL: That was very enlightening to hear about your path to journalism. It makes sense that you loved movies so much.

TERRY LEMONS: That’s one of the things for me that really worked well in terms of being a reporter and a writer, was just having a very broad degree of interest in things. And when I went to the IRS, that came in handy as well, because the IRS had to deal with a lot of different segments of society. My movie knowledge actually came into play one year when the IRS decided that the Hollywood swag bags being handed out at the Oscars needed a little bit of attention, because basically it was a taxable event. So we had a little fun with movie puns that year when we were putting out the press release.

The conversation continues in the Subscriber Edition.

Terry Lemons turns next to humanizing the IRS, lessons from six commissioners, why revenue is the gas in government’s tank, and the 1926 Cardinals.

Watch the Full Episode