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IR-2019-205, December 12, 2019

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service today announced the appointment of 12 new members to the Internal Revenue Service Advisory Council.

The IRSAC, established in 1953, is an organized public forum for IRS officials and representatives of the public to discuss various issues in tax administration. The council provides the IRS commissioner with relevant feedback, observations and recommendations. It will submit its annual report to the agency at a public meeting in Nov. 2020.

The IRS strives to appoint members to the IRSAC who represent the taxpaying public, the tax professional community, small and large businesses, tax exempt and government entities and information reporting interests.

The following persons were appointed to serve three-year appointments on the council beginning in 2020:

Walter “Ted” Afield – Afield is director of the Philip C. Cook Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic and associate clinical professor of law at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He is a member of the American Bar Association Tax Section, the Florida Bar Association and the Atlanta Bar Association.

Martin Armstrong – Armstrong is vice president of Payroll Shared Services with Charter Communications, Inc., in Charlotte, N.C. He is also currently the accounting and finance area chair for the University of Phoenix. Armstrong is a member of the American Payroll Association and the National Association of Tax Professionals.

Sharon Brown – Brown is a partner with Barclay Damon LLP in New York. She is a member of American Bar Association Tax Section and Affordable Housing and Community Development Section, the New York State Bar Association and the National Association of Bond Lawyers.

Robert Howren – Howren is tax director/assistant treasurer for BlueLinx Corporation in Marietta, Ga. He is a member of the Tax Executives Institute, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the Georgia Society of CPAs.

Denise Jackson – Jackson is the vice president of tax preparer development with the State Employees’ Credit Union in Raleigh, N.C, where she supervises and coordinates the training program for over 3,000 tax preparers for the credit union’s 267 branches. She is an enrolled agent and CFP practitioner.

Kathleen Lach – Lach is a partner in the business and finance department of Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr LLP, in Chicago. She is a member of the American Bar Association Tax Section, the Women’s Bar Association and the Chicago Bar Association Alliance for Women.

Kelly Myers – Myers is a tax consultant with Myers Consulting Group, LLC, in Owens Crossroads, Ala. He is a member of the National Association of Enrolled Agents, the National Association of Tax Professionals, the National Society of Accountants and the National Society of Tax Professionals.

Joseph Novak – Novak is vice president of taxes for Abbott Laboratories in Abbott Park, Ill. Novak has served in Abbott’s corporate tax organization since 2004 in a variety of roles, including leadership positions in the income tax accounting, transfer pricing, planning and compliance groups. He is a licensed certified public accountant and member of the Tax Executives Institute.

Robert Panoff – Panoff is a tax attorney in Miami. He is past chair of both the tax section and the continuing legal education committee of the Florida Bar, past president and current member of the Greater Miami Tax Institute, and member of the Miami International Tax Group. He is a recipient of the tax section’s Gerald T. Hart Outstanding Tax Attorney of the Year Award.

Nancy Ruoff – Ruoff is the Statewide Payroll and Collections Manager for the State of Kansas in Topeka, Kan. She is a certified public accountant and member of the American Payroll Association’s Strategic Payroll Leadership Tax Force Government/Public Sector Subcommittee and the National Association of State Comptrollers’ Payroll Information Sharing Group.

Katherine Sunderland – Sunderland is assistant general counsel of tax law at the Investment Company Institute in Washington, an association representing regulated funds globally. She is also involved in OECD’s Business Advisory Group to the OECD’s projects on the Common Reporting Standard (CRS), Tax Relief and Compliance Enhancement (TRACE) and the Digital Economy.

Kevin Valuet – Valuet is senior payroll consultant for PayTech, Inc. He is a member of the American Payroll Association Government Relations Task Force, Strategic Payroll Leadership Task Force and Certification Item Development Task Force.

The 2020 IRSAC Chair is Diana Erbsen, a New York-based tax partner at DLA Piper. She previously served as deputy assistant attorney general for appellate and review for the tax division of the U.S. Department of Justice from Nov. 2014 until Jan. 2017. Erbsen has been an IRSAC member since 2018.

For more information on IRSAC, please visit the Facts page on IRS.gov.

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