Student Lawyer

December 1985

Armed with plain talk, computer printouts, and a list of "freeloaders," D. C. attorney Robert McIntyre wants people to know who's paying taxes, and who's not

 BY BOB JENSEN

Not everyone in Washington appreciates Robert McIntyre's attacks on corporate law loopholes. But allies and opponents agree on one thing: the public interest lawyer has an almost magical ability to transform tax policy into plain English.

"He talks in short sentences, which is rare for a tax lawyer," says consumeradvocate Ralph Nader, who worked with McIntyre for five years. "He explains his point of view well, and he knows how to get people to pay attention to his work," says Mark Bloomfield, a former University of Pennsylvania Law School classmate who now represents corporate interests in Washington.

McIntyre's work has not gone unchallenged, however. His study on corporate tax avoidance would "rate an 'F' in any basic econ course in the country," says Charles Walker, a business consultant and former deputy secretary of the Treasury. Although he prefers not to speculate on McIntyre's motives, Walker says, "some people just like to womp on corporations."

 Despite the criticism, McIntyre has used his deftness with the pen to carve his niche in Washington. As director of federal tax policy for the labor- and church-funded Citizens for Tax Justice, the 36-year-old McIntyre regularly contributes to major newspapers and magazines, and has established himself with politicians and reporters as a respected spokesman for the liberal position on taxes. But his writing skills didn't develop overnight.

"I'm pretty good at it now, but I spent five years after law school learning to speak English again," McIntyre says. "In school you learn to talk like a lawyer, but in this work, that doesn't do you any good. You have to unlearn the jargon. I can speak a little of it still- enough to talk to other lawyers. But I am getting back to my primary language." Bob Jensen is a copy editor for the Montgomery Journal and a Washington free-lance writer.

McIntyre put that primary language to use in August in a report on tax avoidance, "Corporate Taxpayers and Corporate Freeloaders," that was front-page news across the country.

Using data from corporations' 1981-84 annual reports, McIntyre found that 129 of the 275 profitable major U.S. corporations surveyed paid little or no income tax in at least one year. Boeing Co., was the leading tax avoider in the four years; the company received $285 million in tax refunds on profits of more than $2 billion. The expansion of corporate loopholes cost the U.S. Treasury $42.9 billion in fiscal year 1980 and will cost $119.9 billion in FY 1986, according to the report.

The study, a follow-up to one released last year, consumed McIntyre's attention for nearly a month, and his small Washington office shows it. Tax journals overflow the one bookshelf; only the legs of a table in the corner are visible under mounds of paper. His desk sags under towering stacks of newspaper clips, mail, and the print-outs churned out by the personal computer in the comer. The walls are the only space he hasn't filled with paper; silk-screens by his wife, Nancy, hang near his desk, with snapshots of their 5-year old daughter and 1-year-old son tucked in the corners.

 Despite the clutter, McIntyre defends his organizational skills while admitting he is "more of a free-lancer" who works at his own pace.

"Sometimes I can be very intense and get a lot of work done in a hurry. The last three weeks before the study came out, I stopped answering the phone," he says. Other times he's more relaxed, "although that usually pays off in the end too. I tell myself I'm building up my intellectual capital."

CTJ's executive director, David Wilhelm, says McIntyre is intense in most activities-as driven in the sneaker hockey (played on ice without skates) games he organizes as he is at tax policy. "He's a mean sneaker hockey player," Wilhelm says. The diminutive McIntyre admits to playing with intensity, but says, "At 135 pounds, I'm the lightest guy out there. My checks don't do much damage."

 McIntyre's work habits and appearance fit his role as a poker of holes in the corporate image. He wears a traditional blue pin-striped suit, but his haphazardly combed dark hair hangs down farther than current fashion dictates. His feet, perpetually propped up on the desk, are clad not in wingtips, but in soft-soled deck shoes. "My friends don't think I'd be happy in the corporate world, and they're probably right," McIntyre says. "Anyway, I think I burned most of those bridges."

 After graduating from Providence College in 1970 with degrees in math and English, McIntyre enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania Law School. The draft interrupted his studies after one year; McIntyre chose to do two years of alternative service teaching in a school for retarded children and working in a legal aid office, both in Rhode Island.

After graduation in 1975, he moved on to a one-year fellowship at Georgetown University's Institute for Public Representation, where he got his first taste of the U.S. tax code.

"We commented on a lot of federal regulations, and one day my brother called and told me I should work on some new IRS regulations. So he sent me a one-page explanation, and I wrote 45 pages about it," he says. His brother,Tax troubleshooter Robert McIntyre: also an attorney, now teaches tax law at Wayne State University in Detroit.

"I wasn't looking for tax work-I figured that one in the family was enough," McIntyre says.

 His work at Georgetown led to a job with Nader's Public Citizen's Tax Reform Research Group. McIntyre worked there five years, eventually taking over as director. "The salary was about eleven thousand dollars, and I thought that was great. And Ralph, and I got along, so I became a lobbyist," he explains. McIntyre estimates that he testified on about 1,000 bills while with the Nader group. "We tried to be a watchdog-there is a lot of crap in many special-interest bills, and we were able to put a hold on some of it," he says.

About 1980, however, McIntyre says business lobbyists changed tactics; instead of going for little bills, they fought for large tax breaks to benefit all businesses. The result, McIntyre says, was accelerated depreciation, the investment tax credit, and lower capital gains taxes.

By that time, the Nader job was losing its luster. "Ralph and I were also getting tired of each other. Ralph's kind of intense, and so am I. I was getting in a rut, and we were arguing about a lot of things," McIntyre says. And Citizens for Tax Justice was looking to expand its federal tax activities. The group is supported by a coalition of labor unions, churches, public-interestgroups and community-based organizations. "This job also paid a little more-anything pays better than Nader-so I made the move," he says McIntyre's salary increased from about $20,000 a year with Nader to about $30,000 at CTJ.

McIntyre now does little direct lobbying, concentrating on writing and research. "One thing you learn with Nader is to think press relations," McIntyre says, and at CTJ he has perfected that skill. Along with the coverage his reports get, McIntyre's own articles on corporate tax loopholes regularly appear in the New York Times, the Washington Post and New Republic.

Although he makes fewer trips to the Hill to lobby, his ideas still are heard. "He's a bright, creative resource," says Rep. Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota), a former state tax commissioner and House Ways and Means Committee member. "Bob is very thoughtful. He comes from a certain side of the fence, and is identified as a supporter of progressive tax reform, but is well-respected on the Hill."

Thomas Edsall, who covered tax policy for the Washington Post from 1981-83, says he often went to McIntyre for background information. "If I was writing about some complex tax proposal, I'd usually try to talk to someone from the business community, the Joint Committee on Taxation, and McIntyre," he says. "I think his studies have significantly contributed to different perceptions of taxes by the public and on the Hill."

During the debates over tax policy in 1980 and 1981, Edsall says McIntyre was particularly valuable. "The whole 'In school you learn to talk like a lawyer, but in this work, that doesn't do you any good,' says McIntyre, whose deftness with the pen has established him as a respected spokesman for the liberal position on taxes thrust of the debate was dominated by the conservatives-McIntyre was the only voice of any dissent." Since then, Edsall says McIntyre has become an established force in the tax debate. "He's a liberal, and they were being dismissed as irrelevant in '81. But he stayed in there fighting."

CTJ's Wilhelm says political and media people have come to trust McIntyre, "because they know he has no PR ax to grind. They know they can talk to Bob and get the truth."

Business groups, however, disagree with McIntyre's version of the truth. Former classmate Bloomfield, executive director of the American Council for Capital Formation, admits that McIntyre's reports have "raised a lot of havoc. It's a very sexy political issue that gets a lot of attention." But Bloomfield, echoing a common complaint of business groups, says McIntyre's studies are selective and do not look at enough economic indicators.

Nader says such criticism of McIntyre is a sign of his influence. "They wouldn't be debating him if Bob wasn't a force to be reckoned with."

McIntyre finds recognition of his expertise to be one of the benefits of public interest law. "If you hang around something long enough, people think you know everything." The money can't touch corporate salaries, "but you get your name in the paper now and then,"  he jokes, "and that's nice."

He sees more important rewards that keep him in the public-interest sector, however. "I care about the issues. I always did, even before I got involved in tax law. People think taxes are too complicated to discuss. But taxes touch almost everything in American life- energy, housing, family issues," he says.

Wilhelm says McIntyre could easily make five times as much money working in the corporate world. "But I couldn't see him doing that. He would have to compromise his principles, and I don't think there is any way he could wake up in the morning and look at himself in the mirror."

Says McIntyre: "I have no quarrel with people who make lots of money; you can be in private practice and do good work. But if you just do it for money, you end up living for the weekends. I would like to make the world a better place, and taxes are something I know about. It's nice to be able to tell your daughter what you do for a living and be proud of it."

Although he occasionally considers going to work on Capitol Hill and thinks he would like legal aid work, McIntyre has no idea where his career will go. "There is burnout in the field. After the 1978 tax reform bill was dismantled in Congress, a lot of people got tired and quit," he says. "It helps when you are successful." In the Reagan years, McIntyre admits the business community has won most of the tax battles, but he sees the tide slowly turning.

"Friends have been nagging me to set  up a law firm with them," he says, "but I'd like to stick with this until the tax law is better than when I came in."