The Blog

Cindi Holstrom, Director, Department of Revenue Cindi Holmstrom, Director, Department of Revenue

04/10/09

Thanks to the outstanding efforts of our staff, the Department of Revenue recently received two prestigious awards from the Federation of Tax Administrators.

Along with the California Board of Equalization, DOR was named the winner of the 2009 Leon Rothenberg Award for Taxpayer Service and Education. The Rothenberg Award recognizes our excellent accomplishment in establishing the streamlined sales tax initiative. In this campaign, we identified businesses that would be affected by this new system of local sales tax coding on products and how best to help them. We then shared that knowledge with businesses through more than 100 workshops we conducted around the state.

In addition, we made a variety of tools available to businesses, including training videos; city and county tax rates in downloadable formats; tax rate tools that calculate totals and summarize sales by city and county without needing an online connection; and more.

DOR was the sole winner of the 2009 award for training, which recognized the �Wheel of Ethics,� an interactive online program created by the Human Resources and Taxpayer Services divisions. This training program is designed to educate more than 1,000 agency employees on ethics laws and policies governing employee actions. The judges commended DOR for building the training from the ground up, including content, video and the tracking system that automates the administration of the training. This approach resulted in significant cost savings.

These awards demonstrate the high-quality and imaginative work of our employees. They additionally demonstrate our focus on finding cost savings through the use of technology and communications with taxpayers.