Commission seeks better government- public relationships

Brice Wallace 

More convenient, less confrontational.

Those are the goals of a state commission for state government when dealing with Utahns. The Utah Economic Opportunity Commission, at its most recent meeting, discussed ideas for smoothing the interaction between Utahns, including businesses, and state agencies.{mprestriction ids="1,3"}

“I think oftentimes our employees forget the fact that that taxpayer that’s standing in front of them, trying to get a form filled out, is a customer,” said state Sen. Evans Vickers, R-Cedar City and vice chair of the commission’s Working Group on Government Efficiency & Cooperation.

The working group’s chair, House Majority Whip Jefferson Moss, R-Saratoga Springs, said the group’s efforts have been focused on improving the user experience and that ideas for achieving that goal include state government employee training during the onboarding process and fashioning administrative rules to reduce the size and cost of some of the bureaucracy in the state.

“You’ve all been in a situation where you’re faced with having to go through a regulatory process and don’t know anything about how to do it,” Vickers said. “And you either end up with somebody who’s very helpful or somebody that just sends you away, wishing you had never come.”

John Valentine, chair of the Utah State Tax Commission and state commissioner of revenue, described the tax commission as traditionally an agency of enforcement, but officials are trying to change the culture to one of customer service.

“We’re breaking down some of the siloes … to try to make it so that you don’t just get passed from one person to another as you’re trying to solve a tax issue,” Valentine said.

Vickers noted that one issue seems to focus on interpretation of the law, with various investigators looking into a business’s activities not interpreting the law the same way.

However, surveys sent to businesses about interactions with government agencies have not revealed major issues regarding the state, he said.

“Our original thoughts were maybe there’s a business sector out there that we can point to that is really having a struggle with government agencies or something, and I don’t know that there is that,” Vickers said. “I don’t know that we’ve homed in on that yet, but the common theme has been, for the most part, the surveys we’ve seen, people are fairly OK with how we’re responding.”

“We didn’t find that people were saying that there was this ‘smoking gun’ of massive regulatory barrier that was related to what the state does,” said Margaret Busse, executive director of the Utah Department of Commerce. “There’s a lot of federal stuff that people have a hard time navigating, and we can’t change those regulations, and even local [ones].”

Regarding the state’s new-business registration portal, “we want that to be a place where people see it as a resource that’s helping them, not a hurdle they have to overcome,” Busse said.

Gov. Spencer Cox, the commission’s chairman, said his administration is “trying to change that paradigm, that mindset, from one of enforcement to one of assistance.”

“There are bad people out there that are trying to not follow the law, certainly, and we want to catch those people and we want to hold those people accountable,” Cox said. “But most citizens are trying to follow the law; it’s just extremely hard, complicated, confusing. … Our job is to help you follow the law, not to try to trick you or catch you when you’re not following the law.”

Cox said it is easy for state government to say it will work on the state side of such matters, but the federal government, he said, is “so messed-up.”

“I’ve yet to meet a person who’s been audited by the IRS who had a pleasant experience, who came back thinking, ‘That wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.’ Inevitably, it’s always the opposite: ‘Well, that was a lot worse than I thought it was going to be, and I thought it was going to be pretty bad,’” Cox said.

While the state cannot fix the federal system, it might be able to provide a “road map” to help Utahns navigate it, Cox and other commission members said.

The August meeting was “not for solidified proposals” but instead a discussion of the various working groups’ ideas, Cox said. Those groups will take commission input and have firm proposals for possible legislation or the governor’s budget at the commission’s September meeting.

“Please remember,” Cox told the commission, “that the aim of the commission is not just to look at just some of the low-hanging fruit — we’ve done most of that already —but we want to work on the big issues facing our state and ultimately try to build consensus around those issues.”{/mprestriction}