Data Security and Tax Administration Insights with Ryan Minnick, COO at FTA

Meredith: 00:01:02

Welcome to SALTovation.

The SALTovation show is a podcast series featuring the leading voices in SALT where we talk about the issues and strategies to help you make sense of state and local tax. Hi Ryan, thank you so much for joining us today on the SALTovation Podcast. It's great to have you here.

Ryan: 00:01:19

Awesome. Well, thanks for inviting me. I'm really excited to chat with you and Stacy today.

Meredith: 00:01:24

So, to start out, can you tell us about the Federation of Tax Administrators and why it exists?

Ryan: 00:01:30

Yeah, well, I might be a little biased, but I refer to us often as the most important organization you've never heard of. We are an organization that connects the tax administration authorities of all 50 states, plus D.C. new York City, and Philadelphia.

Those are our members.

We also work with numerous municipalities and large cities all over the country that have some sort of technical connection to the tax filing process. So these are cities like Portland, Oregon, San Francisco, California, Louisville, Kentucky.

So anywhere that tax is administered, we initially focused on sales and use and income tax when we were put together. And over the years we have more than 25 programs spanning dozens of different tax types and different agency operational areas.

So we exist to be that connective tissue. So my stakeholders are anyone who works for a revenue agency in the United States, with the exception of the irs. The IRS is a kind of a.

A friendly affiliate of ours. We work with them really closely, but they're not a member so much as they are part of that larger tax ecosystem at the federal level.

Stacey: 00:02:34

Yeah, that's awesome. And even as you list us, the locals, I'm like, yep, check, check, check. Yep, we know them all. We love to hate them all, and we love them all.

So then what is your role within the organization? And then just what are the responsibilities that you view in being that kind of connective tissue at the fta?

Ryan: 00:03:00

Absolutely. Well, I guess more specifically. So my role, I'm our chief operating officer.

I also oversee our programs in the areas of technology, data security, cybersecurity, and data safeguarding.

So some of those things sound very similar to probably some of your listeners, but they are all different programs for us because of how data flows in and out of the tax world.

And nine years ago, when I joined the organization, I actually joined as a technical subject matter expert specializing in the translation of really complicated technology issues for executives. So if you think back nine years ago, things like blockchain were really big back then. Super, super interesting, but super hard to articulate concept.

And so I started there and then over the years picked up more programs, and then I think a little over three years ago, was appointed our chief operating officer, which is just a fancy way to say I, I do whatever I can to clear roadblocks for the team. And for our executive director, Sean Benardi, we have an 18 member board that we work with that's made up of tax commissioners from all over the U.S.

shiron is our fearless leader who gets everybody aligned in purpose. And I'm the person in the engine room making sure that the, you know, the spaceship gets where it needs to go.

And so it's, it's a, it's a tremendous amount of fun.

Some of the challenges that you kind of were asking about organization wide, a lot of people think that we speak for tax agencies or that we have influence over tax agencies.

And I'm here to dispel that myth because tax agencies are part of sovereign entities, which are states, and those sovereign entities can do largely whatever they want.

So whether it's tax law or different code provisions that are passed at the legislative level, or different executive initiatives from the governor's office, those get handed awfully, oftentimes in not a perfectly wrapped package to the tax agency to then implement or to carry out. So our work starts when the tax agency receives that information.

So for anybody out there who's like, oh, I know, Ryan, now I can go complain about tax rates. Tax rates are above our pay grade at fta.

Those are all just what our members are handed and they have to administer them fairly, equally prevent fraud, and ensure there's a measure of efficiency for both the taxpayers and then folks like your stakeholders who are intervening on their behalf.

Meredith: 00:05:15

Don't we all wish that we had a little bit of control over what happened at the states? Right. Maybe we would or would not have a job if we did.

Ryan: 00:05:24

Over the years, there's been many conversations I've had with folks. They get frustrated, they call me first, and I'm always happy to be the first one to get the call because it can be challenging.

There's a lot of permutations on how states handle things. And so what we do at FTA is we try to find those commonalities, those best practices.

So when there's something trending like something like a wayfair decision that comes out, we work with the states really early to not only understand what's happening leading up to a landmark legal decision like that, but then our subject matter experts, our team, like our general counsel, Brian Oliner, our directors of various programs, we coordinate with the states to collect those best practices to understand the issue. That way, when something Landmark happens, whether it's huge, like Wayfair or small, like the trend in electric vehicle taxation for charging.

All of these different things we try to stay in front of so that we can issue out to our members, you know, we can't tell them what to do.

But here's, we've talked to all of you and here's what you're all thinking and here's some commonality and then oftentimes those common threads get woven into everybody's story. And so we can create kind of a semblance of consistency by being that, that interchange and that connection of information for everybody.

Meredith: 00:06:35

Well, I know the conversation just started, but I'm going to give you a pro preemptive thank you for trying to, you know, head off some of that because kind of as you were talking, we're talking about like Wayfair landmark decisions, you know, just impact, right?

If all of a sudden you have this influx of, influx of registrations like we did with Wayfair, you know, kind of also getting the attention of non US based companies of, you know, officers that don't have a Social Security number, it's like, well, we're going to require like an online registration. Let's maybe kind of give another option for, you know, non US entities or people or, you know, some of those items or those hurdles.

Ryan: 00:07:18

Well, I know the team appreciates it, I do. It's, we all of us refer to it as our FTA crystal ball.

And it's, it's, we get it from having a national perspective and having really great relationships with all these various stakeholders, public, private, federal, state, other associations that track specific issues. And when you put all that together, you know, our goal is just to try to get the right information to the right people.

That way when they're first asked the question, they already have that background info. You know, you still see deviation.

I mean, even with all the information sharing in the world, you're never going to get the same outcome in every jurisdiction when they've all got different tax based mixes and different priorities.

And you know, even before you get to the differentiation in political parties and things like that, it, it really, it's actually kind of one of the really fun parts of what we do because we can strip back the issue to the core information, make sure it's shared and be a resource for people to ask questions. And it's always interesting to see how things play out longer term.

And my favorite intersection to work on with our general counsel who runs our legal programs. So I'm technology, he's legal.

Almost everything happening in agencies that involve technology is really more of a policy issue than a technology issue.

So we frequently get into debates and rabbit holes and looking at how do you accommodate things like registration portals or taxpayer access or information disclosure using statutes that have been on the books for decades and probably haven't been updated in the modern Internet era.

So it's this how do we help move tax administration as a, as a practice towards excellence and that continuing practice of excellence while also operating in environments that are legacy environments, both from a policy and a technology standpoint.

You know, complicated issues that come up, especially with changes at the federal level that then have to flow down through the states will shock you. I'm sure that not all federal policy is crafted after polling every single state and finding out what's going to happen to them if they do something.

So even, you know, responding to those issues in real time, as bills are moving through Congress or as court cases are working their way through, it's, it's really, you know, our, our job is to try to see things coming before they happen. We've got a pretty good track record.

We don't, we don't hit them all, but it's something that I think our members appreciate and hopefully the downstream effects, whether you all directly see it in your work as practitioners or not, something that we're pretty proud of.

Meredith: 00:09:47

Well, and as you represent, you know, all of the states, D.C. and you know, some of the locals that you had referenced, like what does support for those tax authorities and whatnot, what does that mean?

Right, because when you talk about, you know, we started with sales tax and income tax, and then we've expanded the programming, like, what does support look like or what does that mean?

Ryan: 00:10:10

So we're, you know, we're not, you know, we have many attorneys on our team. We're not all attorneys, so this analogy only goes so far, but we're almost like a law firm on retainer.

So we are a tax administration resource on retainer. We not only push information out, but we also are available when someone encounters an issue they've never encountered before.

We're the folks you generally come to and ask what to do or what you need to know when you've encountered a new issue and you've, you've never seen it before for. Because one of two things happens.

Either we've seen it somewhere else in a different state and we can connect the dots and we can help people find the information they need, or if we've never seen it before, we can actually facilitate Some of that research and information gathering to try to understand the issue better, to try to facilitate a solution, whether. And it's so varied across the organization.

So I mentioned we have 25 different programs that range from E filing of taxes, which I suppose a fun fact is we're the custodian for all of the state formats for E filing for any of the tax types. So the IRS has their E filing system, they have their schemas, their formats that they require the state versions of those schemas.

FTA is the custodian. We facilitate that development. We host those files for states to pull down.

In fact, the one part of tax administration we don't get involved in is anything involving taxpayer data.

So one of the big perks of our role is that we get to look at all of the application and resources and how all of these different regulations impact things, but we don't have the burden of analyzing or looking specifically at taxpayer data.

I mean, that's a sovereign responsibility of those various states or in some cases, a shared responsibility for different national programs that they belong to. But fta, we're the knowledge as opposed to the data.

So when I talk about things like sharing information, just so everybody's clear and on the same page about it. But every agency is a little different. I mean, everybody's organized a little differently.

Everybody, you know, some people or some agencies organized functionally where they, you know, you put your audit collections, customer experience, call center, you put them all in verticals, and you coordinate the work across all tax types.

Some agencies organize functionally where they have, within those larger verticals, they may have a dedicated group that's just income tax or just corp tax or just sales tax. That way they can kind of rotate and huddle knowledge. There's no, there's no best approach or worst approach. And, you know, the.

Our largest agency that's a member has, you know, several thousand employees. Our smallest agency that's a member has, you know, a little over 100 employees.

So it really depends on the taxes they're charged with, administering their role, how they interface with other state agencies. So we talked about this at the, at the CRUSH panel. Not all states, state agencies have control over their IT environment within their agency.

A lot of them have to coordinate through a state central authority. And that state central authority then has to collate the priorities of every state agency.

And in some states, those agencies can number in the hundreds depending on how the state structures all their various programs.

So it's very different to make a change when you have control of your entire technology stack versus when you have to compete with other state agencies for that coding time and that technology resource. So yeah, it makes our jobs very interesting day to day because there's no easy translation.

In fact, even for most roles in the middle of the agency outside of your executive leadership, oftentimes the titles don't match.

So we rely heavily on our experience and our knowledge of the states to even connect person A with person B of the same, you know, the same role and responsibility because everybody's civil service is different in those states as well.

Meredith: 00:13:59

So I have a question. So when would a agency I guess kind of decide and what might be a decide deciding factor for them to become a member?

Ryan: 00:14:08

So we're really lucky in that from the outset we've had all 50 states as members of FTA. So the, you know, all 50 states plus DC have been in from the start or largely close to the start.

So you can tell probably by looking at me, I haven't been here for the full almost 90 years that FTA has been around. I know a few things.

But you know, along the way, very early on we had complete participation, which is a lot of the secret to our success because we were, we have knowledge representative of all the regions of the country, large states, small states, income tax states, non income tax states, sales tax states, non sales tax states. It. We also have insights into excise tax administration.

So things like tobacco and motor fuel, which are highly complex things to administer both from a compliance and a tax standpoint. And then along the ways we started adding large cities. So Philadelphia and New York City are full members of fta.

They, they joined due to their, their size and scope of tax administration.

So we have, you know, requirements for kind of full membership that require you to administer a tax very specifically and to administer it for a large enough population to where, you know, your work is analogous to other members over time. We've also worked with all these municipalities that I mentioned. So it's the handful I mentioned the outset.

It's also, you know, even large counties like Cook County, Illinois, which is, you know, one of the larger than some small states in population, just one county. Yeah. So anyone that has that tax administration responsibility.

And so from a membership standpoint, if an entity qualifies or an organization qualifies for membership, you know, if their priority is administering tax, having access to that real time communication, also having access to that lifeline of reaching people outside of your state, your agency, your municipality, there's no other organization that provides what we provide.

We're really proud of that because everyone in their role, if we worked for state agencies, our job is heads down, focused on our state, our environment. We know our statutes, we know our regulations, we know our systems.

But when something novel comes up, we don't immediately have a national relationship that we can tap into individually. People build that by working with fta. So they do it in a couple of ways.

One is this is probably a good segue into how we deliver some of this information. So we have a national circuit of conferences and working group meetings.

We do just shy of 30 a year, which is actually quite a big lift for a team of 11. There's 11 of us, we got eight full time, three part time and they range in subject matter.

So some of them are regional meetings that deal with the executive perspective and agency leadership. We have a national meeting in June every year of our tax commissioners.

All of the governor appointed or elected tax commissioners in the United States for these state agencies. They get together with their top legal counsel and top deputies and talk about like the 50,000 foot issues.

So things that are trending best practices.

It's also where we recognize excellence with our FTA awards, where any programs they've implemented over the last year they can submit and get judged by a panel of tax administration experts on what qualifies as innovation and excellence in tax administration. You flow that through to the fall when a lot of these meetings happen. We have a technology conference.

We have the only technology conference in service to state tax administrators. A lot of the technology tax conferences really cater more to the practitioner community.

And then states might attend from a subject matter perspective.

But we host a 4 to 500 person technology conference every year that focuses on solutions, best practices for administering tax and those systems that impact that. We have specialized conferences for revenue estimation and tax policy, for E filing and fraud prevention, for tobacco and motor fuel taxation.

t finished that at the end of: 2024

And so we bring together government only folks with a few private sector guests that can come in and present and then we kick them out so they, they can't hear the government, only discussions. But that's where we talk about the business, the work of tax administration.

So audit compliance, collections, customer experience, criminal investigation. So it's, it's these national platforms for connecting with each other.

And then even deeper than that, since I didn't list off 30 just now, there's other working groups that get together regularly to learn best practices to talk about very specific issues. So we do that in person, which is a big chunk of how we engage. We engage with just shy of about 4,000 tax administrators every year.

4,000 of the roughly 50, 51,000 people that work for our members. We have also an online platform called our FTA community. I'm actually repping my FTA community pin today for the podcast.

And that community platform is really kind of a bespoke version of LinkedIn just for the tax administrators and those state agencies so can engage with each other in subject matter areas. So those 25 programs we have, they all have many sub communities on that website.

So anybody who has varied responsibilities or has an interest in learning, all those resources are available there for them. We, we engage with, you know, thousands of tax administrators there as well.

And then we also have our kind of infrequent, you know, either infrequent webinar and learning opportunities, some of which are open to the private sector. So we do.

Our website is taxadmin.org Most of your practitioner folks, if they don't recognize FTA, they may recognize that URL because we host lists of sales tax holidays and different tax rate tables and things that are really valuable. We actually have a page that almost every practitioner I meet has bookmarked and they never knew it was us.

It's a list of all the website links for every tax agency in the country. So that's their, that's their homepage and they go through. If you need to get to Alaska or, you know, Nevada, you can click through.

So our public website has a great calendar of events. What's open to people in the private sector, what isn't. So we host a lot of those opportunities in person and online.

We also do regular sharing calls so that states can build relationships and talk about emerging issues. Yeah, we also author a lot of things for our members. Working papers on various emerging trends. Some of those we talk about publicly.

We also conduct every couple years a survey of tax administrators. So anyone who's really curious about trends nationally. It's a publicly available survey.

We do it in partnership with EY and Georgia State University, the Andrew Young School of Business there.

f the survey was conducted in: 2023

It's collated nationally, regionally by category and it talks 47 page report that talks about, you know, what are the priorities, where are they allocating resources, what are challenges that they're experiencing, what are the, you know, what's recruitment and retention look like?

So all of those really important issues that we want to help communicate to the outside world that tax administrators are going through in their agencies.

Meredith: 00:21:25

Well, it sounds like you need some more stuff to do, right?

Ryan: 00:21:27

You got any projects for me?

Meredith: 00:21:29

Right, right, right.

Your technology conference that you said that you held in the fall, is that just for kind of the public tax agencies, or do you make that available to practitioners or the private sectors that's.

Ryan: 00:21:44

Open to the private sector for attendance. It's. I might be biased. It's the first.

When I was, when I joined the organization and took over our technology programs, I inherited responsibility for that conference. So it's, it's, it's been my, my conference child. I have the primary responsibility for kind of keeping that one on the rails.

And, you know, our entire team contributes content from their subject matter viewpoint to all of our conferences. But we all have one that we kind of run point on and coordinate in. The technology conference is mine.

So I'm a little biased, but I think everybody should go to it because it's a great opportunity to hear from technologists and business leaders about what their priorities are, what they're working on, what their challenges are.

We have a lot of now kind of the startup community that's looking to serve government in some way, shape or form with some of these innovative technologies.

We have a few that now attend our conferences even before they've defined their product because they want to understand the issues that tax administrators are going through so that they can, as they're developing their solution, actually be in lockstep.

s, early: 2000

great conference. Actually in: 2025

It's the second week of August. All those details typically get posted to our website, you know, about, you know, three to four months before the conference with agenda information.

And if there's any subject matter experts listening who want to share their knowledge with the states, I encourage them to, you know, reach out to me or the FTA team because we're always looking for speaker proposals.

Sometimes we'll put emerging experts on panels together it's how we cover things like ethics and transparency and you know, an era of artificial intelligence. We, we have a lot of partners in various other, various tax compliance spaces that, you know, they, they see things a little differently.

They, you know, when you work with your customers as practitioners or if you're a large taxpayer, you know, you've got a view on some of these emerging issues. And you know, we're, we like to break the echo chamber. So wherever possible, we bring in as many diverse viewpoints as much relevant information.

Even if it feels, in the case of technology, a little science fiction to government. Sometimes new technology is always adopted first by the private sector.

And they correctly, happily for us, they get to try and fail and experiment a little bit before we bring it into a sensitive environment like government.

But we often bring those topics up early because we want our stakeholders to be thinking about them in their day to day work before it becomes part of their workflow. So that when it does come time to use these tools, they can use them most effectively for what they need to get done.

Meredith: 00:24:37

Days. Feel like going to Washington in August. I mean, it's a nice time to be in Washington.

Maybe, maybe not in like the fall or the winter, but I mean, Stacy and I went to Texas in June a couple years ago. So, you know, this is something we want to get involved in. I don't really want to go to Texas in June.

No offense to Texas, but it's, we live in the mountains now. It's dry. It's very not dry in Texas in June.

Ryan: 00:25:01

Oh yeah. Second week of August, Tacoma outside of Seattle. Really, you know, really great, great spot where we moved that conference. Yeah. Not raining yet. Nope.

Nope.

Meredith: 00:25:12

Can probably still see Mount Rainier out there.

Ryan: 00:25:14

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice. Pretty view. Yeah, we, that conference does move around. Actually all of our conferences move around. So because we serve national stakeholders.

t's going to be, you know, in: 2026

So our annual meeting in June that I mentioned, that's going to be actually in Chicago, Illinois, which people get very excited about because who doesn't love Chicago? And I'm sure we'll see really great attendance there.

And again, that's more targeted towards the maybe tax practitioner leaders who are interested in kind of legal and policy perspectives from the states. We have a really robust legal and policy track that Brian Ollen or our general counsel puts together.

We've got a great speaker series in our general session that SRAN works with all of our agency and various organization partners to bring in really great speakers on emerging trends, economic data, things that are going to impact tax administration over the next 12 months. So it's a really great opportunity to, you know, anybody who's interested in the 50,000 foot view of tax come hang out with us in June.

And then anything that emerges from that conference you want to know more about, join us at the appropriate conference in the fall and we we dig a little deeper, we go down into that 10,000, 5,000 foot view that help people functionally get their jobs done.

Meredith: 00:26:28

That sounds great. Look Stace, we're going home in June and then we're going to go, you know, take it back west in August. Let's do it. Sign me up.

Ryan: 00:26:37

Awesome. Can't wait.

Meredith: 00:26:39

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended, nor should it be relied upon as legal tax, accounting or investment advice. You should consult with a competent professional to discuss specifics of your situation and the applicability of the information presented.