For exhibiting wisdom beyond your years, you were chosen at an early age to serve as chief of staff for the National Commission on Restructuring the Internal Revenue Service. Grappling with such complexity proved useful experience when you later directed the restructuring of the National Association of Securities Dealers and negotiated the sale of both the NASDAQ Stock Market and the American Stock Exchange. Who better, then, to lead the I.R.S., whose one hundred thousand employees each year expend twelve billion dollars in collecting the two-and-half trillion dollars that fuel our democracy? Your first step was the successful upgrading of the service’s massive and decrepit data systems, followed by increasing the standards and the training of paid tax preparers. Most dramatically, you tackled the persistent inequities that result from tax avoidance. You required corporate avoiders to reveal the often aggressive tactics they used to lower their bills. You worked with the Justice Department to blow the cover on tens of thousands of individuals who had hidden assets overseas. You even persuaded Switzerland to identify thousands of those legendarily private bank accounts. All of which work has, according to Timothy Geithner, “helped make our nation’s tax system more fair, efficient, and effective.”