“You want people to be themselves. You're going to get the most productivity, the most career longevity from somebody that's happy about being where they are,” says De Lon Harris. 

In celebration of Pride Month, Skadden tax senior advisor De Lon Harris joins Eman Cuyler and Stefane Victor on “GILTI Conscience,” where he discusses his life and career as a gay professional. De Lon talks about his 30-plus years at the IRS and the different roles he took on, as well as his experience as a gay person working in government service. He also touches on mentorship, including the importance of seeking diversity in mentors.

💡 Featured Guests 💡

Name: De Lon Harris

What he does:   De Lon Harris is the Senior Advisor for Tax Resolution Strategies at Skadden. With more than three decades of experience at the IRS, De Lon Harris counsels clients on a wide range of tax controversy matters.

Organization:  Skadden

Words of wisdom:  “You can't truly be happy if you're not comfortable in the workplace or you're not being exactly who you need to be.”

Connect:  LinkedIn

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GILTI Conscience is a podcast by Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, and Affiliates. Skadden’s tax team is recognized globally for providing clients with creative and innovative solutions to their most pressing transactional, planning, and controversy challenges. The insights and views presented in GILTI Conscience are for general information purposes only and should not be taken as legal advice for any individual case or situation. The information presented is not a substitute for consulting with an attorney, nor does tuning into this podcast constitute an attorney-client relationship of any kind.

This is GILTI Conscience: Casual Discussions on Transfer Pricing, Tax Treaties, and Related Topics, a podcast from Skadden that invites thought leaders and industry experts to discuss pressing transfer pricing issues, international tax reform efforts, and tax administration trends. We also dig into the innovative approaches companies are using to navigate the international tax environment and address the obligation everyone loves to hate. Now your hosts, Skadden Partners, David Farhat and Nate Carden.

Hello, and thank you for joining us for another episode of GILTI Conscience. Our hosts, David Farhat and Nate Carden, won't be joining us this episode. My name is Stefane Victor, and I'm joined by Eman Cuyler to bring you a very special episode today as a part of our Celebrating Pride Month series. Today we're joined by De Lon Harris. De Lon is a senior advisor for tax resolution strategies here at Skadden. He joined us from the IRS where he was in a variety of roles over a 30-year stint, but last he was the Commissioner for the Small Business and Self-Employed division. We're really excited to have you here to celebrate Pride Month, talk about your career and your existence as a gay professional. Welcome.

Yeah, well, thank you Stefan and Eman. This is really one of those things that doesn't seem a lot like a chore or work to me to come in and talk about these sort of things, especially during Pride Month. I think it's very important. And I just want to point out, I did spend 37 years at the IRS, but I started there when I was 12 years old. So that can give you an idea of how old I am today.

So jumping right in, can you discuss your career path and how you got to your current role at Skadden? Fun fact, De Lon is in fact not an attorney.

Yeah, one of the few not attorneys on the professional staff at Skadden, but not the first time that this has happened. I think I'm the third person that has stepped into this role from the IRS to Skadden. The first person was a non-attorney like myself. And the second who happened to be one of my mentors at the IRS and still a very close personal friend of mine, Diane Ryan, was prior to me, but she was an attorney. So yeah, it's interesting when I tell people where I work, there's always that assumption that I do carry that law degree with me, which I don't. But I do feel like I've worked with enough attorneys at both the IRS and here at Skadden and outside in my professional career that maybe I can be an honorary attorney for at least a month up.

Definitely. So can you talk a little bit about your upbringing and how did that inform your experience as a gay person in tax?

Sure. Well, really, so you can figure out my age. I was born in 1962, so I grew up my formative years in the '70s, late '70s, graduated high school in the early '80s and was in college in the '80s. I didn't get my master's until after I started with the IRS much later. But during this time, this was a very different time. And I also grew up in the Midwest. I grew up in Oklahoma, in Western Oklahoma in a farming community. My parents had lived there for four generations in Western Oklahoma as farmers and ranchers. And so that's how I grew up, and very much a different existence than I lived today in Washington and how I lived after I became an adult.

I would not take for nothing that experience of growing up the way I did. I was certainly given a lot of good values and work ethic. But in growing up in kind of conservative area, in a conservative family, you learn pretty quickly that being gay was not what was expected of you and that the expectation was that heterosexual wife when you grew up and that sort of environment. My family, though not what I would call very religious, and so I learned pretty soon how to cover those feelings and live the way that I was expected to live throughout my high school years and even into college somewhat. And so it was after I got away from home that I was able to explore those feelings and kind of be more of who I wanted to be. But you also have to look at the time this is, that it still didn't really matter. I never thought in my lifetime that we would see progress like we've seen over the last 20 years.

So I just assume that I would always be kind of in the shadows with my personal life for hiding. And that's how I started out my career. Once I left school and took a job with the IRS as a revenue agent going out and doing audits, that's how I lived my work life, is not telling people who I really was but pretending to be something that I wasn't. That's not a healthy way to live, and it's not a fun way to live really when you're always having to hide who you really are. And so I think it was in 1994, I took my first management job with the IRS and I moved from Oklahoma City to Tulsa. And that's not a big move geographically. It's only about 100 miles between the two cities. But I decided at that time just made the decision that I'm not going to advertise that I'm gay. I'm not going to what we would call out and proud and be trying to change the world, but I wasn't going to hide it either.

And so it wasn't long after I moved to Tulsa that I met my now husband, which was next July, it will be 30 years ago that I met my now husband.

Oh, wow.

And so also from Oklahoma, from the Tulsa area. And so after time we moved in together, of course you weren't able to be married. That just wasn't an option.

No, that is such an interesting background. I guess one thing that I wanted to get your opinion on was, how was your experience once you moved from Oklahoma to D.C? Did you feel like you were able to have a more positive experience or did anything fundamentally change?

So between that move, we had moved to Dallas for a couple of years before we moved to D.C. And in Dallas we were kind of in a cocoon as well. I was out to the people that I worked with. We lived in a cocoon. And what I mean by that, if in Dallas we lived in a small community that's close to the downtown area, close to where we worked, it was self-sustaining. The grocery store was there, everything we did for entertainment was there. It was a pocket of mostly gay individuals that lived in this particular area of town. So we felt like we were kind of sheltered in that way. But the other thing is we didn't know any different. This is how we had both grown up. We had grown up hiding who we are, so we could immediately go back into that mode if we needed to.

Yeah, I have a question about that.

Yeah.

Do you think that the IRS at the time or that firms at the time, speaking more broadly, were they at all interested in attracting and retaining diversity within the workforce? Or did you feel like as a person working there that they were actually trying to pose more uniformity in the workforce?

I think that they were trying to have a diverse workforce when it came to things like race and gender, but I do not think that a sexual preference was even a thought of the organization of a diverse workforce, right?

Yep.

So I don't think that went into any of the thinking of hiring or recruiting like you see nowadays. Of course, things had changed at the IRS, but I still don't think that the IRS goes out and would actively recruit on the basis sexual preference at all. I think that they are very much more accepting and there are a lot of out and proud gay folks at the IRS now and in higher positions, but I don't think it's something that even now that they really go out and recruit for.

Yeah. And I think , I mean, that's the interesting and the tough thing as far as the work that needs to be done about the DEI movement and initiative in general. It's not just the things that we know and the things that we've already become formalized with. It's not just those aspects of diversity. It's also expanding our understanding to an ever-changing society and still creating space when it feels new or uncomfortable.

Right.

But that is... I mean, you said so much, so many interesting things about your career. We talked about discrimination in particular, but are there issues facing LGBT candidates at the IRS or in private practice that pose a specific burden to them?

And to add to that, I would also say, what can we do to address those issues?

Yeah. When I step back and look now at the candidates that are coming here in here at Skadden since the time that I've been here and those that have came before me, I don't really think that there's anything more that Skadden could do at our firm as far as what they do to celebrate the diversity of the workforce, which includes sexual preference.

But when it comes to those in government functions, those that do wish to go into that line of work, the government is all across the U.S. So those people that are hired into government can be hired and placed anywhere across the U.S. So we're not all living in Washington, D.C or San Francisco or New York City or a large metropolitan area. So of course there are still things that government can do, and I'm sure firms across the nation can do, to make sure that people feel safe in the workplace to be who they are and not be hiding who they are. You want people to be themselves, that you're going to get the most productivity, the most longevity of a career from somebody that's happy about being where they are. And you can't truly be happy if you're not comfortable in the workplace or you're not being exactly who you need to be.

One of the things that I really wanted to talk about in this episode in addition to some of the topics we've covered, is really your experience at the IRS. To what Stefan said earlier you've spent over 30 years there. And during that time you've held some of the most senior roles within the IRS. I would really love to talk about some of your accomplishments, some of your initiatives. I know you started at Appeals and then went to large business and international division, then small business as self-employed where you are the commissioner. Maybe starting with Appeals, can you talk about some of the projects that you worked on and then just elaborate on that for us please?

Sure. And before I go onto that, I just want to say one more thing about being a gay leader at the IRS in a high position. I was certainly not the first person to be in a commissioner role at the IRS or a high ranking role at the IRS that was gay, but I will say that there were not a lot of those individuals that made it known or that maybe felt comfortable enough to talk about their personal lives and who they were as a person. But I do see that getting better as time goes on.

Yeah, so starting with Appeals, Appeals was probably one of the best moves I ever made within the service. A lot of people will ask, "Oh, you spent 37 years in government service and in one place like the IRS, how could you spend that much time at one place, like going to work for one law firm and staying there for that long?" And the way I answer that is, it's because there were so many different opportunities within the IRS. I did not audit tax returns my entire 37 years at the IRS, right? That was a small portion in my career that led me to other places within the service.

Even before becoming an executive, I spent time in the taxpayer advocate service, which has a whole different role than most of the IRS. And so it was after that that I moved over to Appeals. And that was really a good fit because in the taxpayer advocate service, I was advocating for the taxpayer. I was looking at the way IRS systems were working and pointing out to them how they could be better. We were writing legislative recommendations that some of which were taken up and actually passed. And so I'm very proud of the work I did there and that I was able to take on the mission of the Taxpayer Advocate Service and advocating for taxpayers, which is much different than the mission of a revenue agent auditing tax returns, right?

Yeah.

So moving over to Appeals was a pretty easy move for me, because then the mission becomes, there is settling cases to the... So the whole reason Appeals was even started at the IRS was because the tax court was overwhelmed with work and they needed a way to keep those cases from being litigated. The Appeals division was born. And so I spent 10 years of that 37 years within Appeals. So a good chunk of my time was in Appeals. First starting out as an Appeals officer analyst that wrote IRMs. And we tried to bring Appeals a little bit forward in how they tracked cases, which was much different than what the rest of the service was doing and kind of bringing technology in. So I'm very proud of working on that.

One of the last things that I worked on there as an executive in Appeals was the AJAC program, which is an acronym that basically says that Appeals is not there to work the case, Appeals is there to settle the case. So if you're going to bring additional issues up that exam or collection hasn't looked at, then these cases need to go back for collection and exam to consider before Appeals considers settling those cases or what the hazards of litigation would be. I just really enjoyed my time in Appeals because of looking at things in a gray area as opposed to black and white. And maybe that is somewhat a makeup of my personality that I don't see things as black and white, but I do see most things in the world as gray and we have to figure out a way to compromise and move forward together.

What do you say to some practitioners that might say that Appeals is no longer an independent avenue to go to?

So when I left Appeals, after Appeals, I went on to large business and international and then over back to small business and self-employed. And so there was a good number of years in there since I've actually been in Appeals, right? So when I left the service or right prior to leaving the service, and I would talk to practitioners on the outside or came over to Skadden and I would start talking to people here in the firm and started learning how people were very dissatisfied with what Appeals has become, we will say, and started talking to them and finding out that cases weren't really getting settled. They felt like they were getting rubber-stamped by what was going on in compliance.

And to the point that I've even had some of our attorneys here say, "What's the point of even going to Appeals?" And that really kind of broke my heart to tell you the truth, because Appeals was a big part, like I said, of my career, and I was very proud of that time there. But I have seen where there is evidence that Appeals has not really stuck to the mission of trying to settle those cases to the best of their ability. And probably a lot of that is I try to take it back to a lack of training that the IRS has been able to do over the last 10 or 15 years because of that lack of budget. So I'm hoping maybe this new budget will revitalize where they're able to really train those people.

I know there's a big push with trying to get Appeals' officers attract people from the outside as opposed to promoting within, because even though it was easy for me to move from one mission to another, I know for a lot of revenue agents, it is not that easy to move from the mission that they have been doing over the last many years of auditing tax returns to them being there adjudicating cases and trying to come up with a settlement amount, and it's very hard for them to get past their compliance roots. So I think that we need to give Appeals a chance. I feel like they're taking some steps to move the organization back to maybe its mission and we're all just kind of waiting and seeing at this point.

Yeah, I'm actually with you. I do feel like having more resources, a larger budget, I think that's definitely going to make a difference moving forward. Going back to your time at the large business and international operating division, what was your role there?

I had a couple of different roles when I went over to large business and international or LB&I. After I'd been an executive for five years and executives within the service, they're expected not to just stay in the same role for 20 years. They're expected every three or four years to kind of move around to a different spot within the organization. And so I knew by being five years as an executive in Appeals, as much as I liked it there, that I needed for my own growth to move to another division. And large business was a place that I had not been before. And so I spent five years over there, first as the director of field operations and then next as the assistant deputy commissioner in LB&I. It kind of brought me back to that compliance perspective. And we worked on a lot of different things there.

We worked on how you can do less with more. And that assistant deputy commissioner role, one of my jobs was the campaigns that had just come up. The campaigns was born out of an idea of we can't audit everything. We don't have the manpower, we don't have the money, so we're going to be issue specific and look at specific issues to work on. So that particular program was kind of just thrown off the cliff and put into process, and then we kind of built the actual procedures around it as we fell off that cliff. And so my office was responsible for taking care of that.

We did a lot of restructuring while we were over there and bringing a policy office to LB&I, which there had never been one there before. They had always depended on the small business division to run all of exam policy. And so I'm proud of my time. And my time was actually... I felt cut short in LB&I because I had spent a couple of years as the DFO and then a couple of years or more as the assistant deputy commissioner. And then to get the call from the deputy commissioner at the time asking me to go over as a deputy commissioner to SBSC was really quite surprising to me.

Yeah. Thank you so much for that background. And I think as we're getting near to the end, I just want to say that it's been a privilege to have you here at Skadden. It's always great to talk to you about your experience.

Well, I've really enjoyed it at Skadden. It's been a decision that I was very... it's a hard decision to make to retire after you've been at an organization so long, but then once you make it, you feel like you've made the right decision. And then when approached by Skadden, it was nerve wracking to say the least, feeling like that I was going to come over here as a non-attorney and be sitting here advising and working with our associates and partners and council. It has just been such a pleasure and a lot of fun. I feel like that I knew my next adventure needed to be fun or I needed to be retired. One, one or the other. And this has been a lot of fun because we get to solve problems and I get to keep in touch with my roots at the IRS and call on them when needed to fix some issues and put some issues in front of them that they need to know about. And so that's just been a lot of fun, and I've enjoyed it here.

Well, I think for our listeners, that might be something that they didn't expect to hear. Of all the great things that people say about Skadden, very few have so far on this podcast, said that they came here to have fun. So that's great to hear.

As we wrap up, I have a question about mentorship because we've talked about that on various episodes. So how did you utilize your mentors in making all career decisions and all the career moves that you did? And an additional point on that is, did you ever lean on them in maybe coming out to them a little bit earlier than you did the rest of your colleagues, or was that something that even from them, you also kept pretty close to the vest?

Now this is a great question, and I think it evolved over time, right? I had never had one gay mentor while I was at the IRS in my career. My mentor started out early though there, started with my frontline manager that I had as a revenue agent right out of training. He's a guy who's no longer at the IRS, but he is still around. And I talked to him occasionally. He was a tough manager. He loved tax law. He just absolutely loved it. And so what I took from him was mentorship on the technical aspects of my job, but I also saw what I shouldn't be doing as a person as far as work-life balance, right?

Other mentors I've had came later on in my career as I started advancing and into the executive ranks, and I did confide in them. They knew that I was gay, but I did confide in them. "Would a gay man be able to break into the executive ranks?" And they assured me that that would not be a problem, and that there were others that had went before me and it's what I wanted to make of it. And so those mentors actually brought me to Skadden.

I mentioned Diane Ryan, who held the position I'm in now prior to me and prior to her retirement here at Skadden. Diane, she was my chief when I was in Appeals, and she's the one that really pushed me to become an executive and put me in roles and challenged me when I needed to be challenged. And when she left, it was really devastating to me, and she came to Skadden and I kept in touch with her. When she decided to retire, she called me and said, "I think you ought to think about a role now outside of government service, and maybe Skadden is the place for you."So mentors are important.

Now, today for gay folks, I encourage you because I think there are mentors that are gay that are in higher ranking positions. And I think you should look for somebody that's like you, but don't limit yourself to just you or we will become what we're trying to fight, right?

Yeah.

I mean, we need diversity even in our mentors. So anyway, that's, I guess, what I got to say about mentorship.

We couldn't have a better note to end on because that's something that we've heard echoed on a variety of episodes, and it's a really great message. I can't thank you enough for being our guest and to help us celebrate Pride Month. This has been a treat and fun to use your words. So yeah, thank you so much.

Thanks to both of you. It's been a treat for me for sure. And happy Pride.

Yeah, happy Pride.

Thank you for joining us for today's episode of GILTI Conscience. If you like what you're hearing, be sure to subscribe in your favorite podcast app so you don't miss any future conversations. Skadden's tax team is recognized globally for providing clients with creative and innovative solutions to their most pressing, transactional, planning and controversy challenges. Additional information about Skadden can be found at skadden.com.