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Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, in a few minutes, the Senate will vote on the confirmation of Marjorie A. Rollinson to serve as Chief Counsel of the Internal Revenue Service, and I want to make a few key points about her.

First, she has exactly the right experience to do the job. She has decades of tax and management experience in both the private sector and the public sector. She spent several years at the IRS Office of Chief Counsel. She has also been the Technical Deputy Associate Chief Counsel and the Associate Chief Counsel--both times on international tax issues--so she has real expertise on these issues. That is a big reason she got bipartisan support in the Finance Committee.

And this is a crucial time for the Agency in terms of implementing and enforcing tax laws, and I will just give colleagues a couple of quick examples that I know Members feel strongly about, and I would like to start with energy.

One of the big implementation jobs in the works--something that I have been very involved in and I know Members on both sides have--deals with a key part of the Inflation Reduction Act, specifically the area of incentives for energy production. This was the centerpiece of the Finance Committee's Clean Energy for America Act, a bill that I first introduced in 2015.

What motivated that legislation--and I see a number of my Finance Committee colleagues here--is we said that, for the future, to tackle climate in the right way, we had to set aside the old system of picking winners and losers and just propping up the old, carbon-intensive technologies and, in effect, go to a new system--a brandnew system--of technological neutrality--in effect, giving all the energy sources in America the opportunity to compete and compete in a way where there are no mandates--in effect, private sector style competition--with one goal: reducing carbon emissions.

The Senate Finance Committee--and there are several members on the floor right now--understands this. Our committee had never done anything like this in 100 years--to create this kind of market incentive, a market incentive to actually reduce carbon emissions.

Now, the administration has been working through, right now, a number of challenging rules. Technology neutrality is the next big one for them. It is essential to get this guidance out there so that taxpayers and clean energy producers can take full advantage of the law and, particularly, be part of this new system, this new approach, that we call technological neutrality. It will give every Member of this body-- and I see additional members of the Finance Committee coming in--an opportunity to be part of this very new world in energy, and Ms. Rollinson will play a chief role as IRS Chief Counsel once she is confirmed.

If she is confirmed, she is going to play another important role in terms of tax enforcement. Every member of the Finance Committee feels strongly about making sure audits are dealt with in a responsible way. We want to do it by the book so it is not just low-income families who get audited. Everybody who is skirting the law should be subject to equal treatment under the law, and we ought to crack down on the sophisticated, wealthy tax cheats who pay for the best tax lawyers and accountants. It is a matter of basic fairness with respect to audits, and Ms. Rollinson will handle that in the right fashion.

I will close by saying I think Ms. Rollinson is an excellent pick for the job. This is a crucial time for this position. They are going to be implementing a very new energy world, a world based on technological neutrality and marketplace competition, and they are going to have the responsibility of ensuring the enforcement of tax law in a fair way, particularly as it relates to audits. That is why she got bipartisan support in the Finance Committee. It is why she deserves bipartisan support today.

I urge my colleagues now to approve the Rollinson nomination.

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