Government Executive - Authors - Gary M. Stern

Pay Your Taxes, Please

Gary M. Stern — Wed, 01 Dec 1999 00:00:00 -0500

gstern@govexec.com

incent Caputo, a 27-year veteran of the Internal Revenue Service, has spent the past 12 years of his career in what he calls the agency's last line of defense-collections. After delinquent taxpayers have ignored payment notices and refused to pay their tax bills, collection agents knock on their doors to recover what the government is owed. In the past, he says, that task typically involved entering a taxpayer's home and saying: "You have a house and equity in it. You owe taxes. We want your equity."

But that aggressive, unrelenting approach is giving way to a kinder, gentler way of doing business. Under the leadership of Commissioner Charles Rossotti, the IRS is introducing a sweeping customer-service effort that is transforming both the organization's structure and how it interacts with the American taxpayer.

After numerous taxpayers testified before Congress last year about mistreatment at the hands of the IRS and agency whistleblowers revealed they were rated largely on the basis of how much revenue they generated, Congress passed the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act. The law requires the IRS to overhaul its operations and upgrade its technology to improve customer service.

Shortly after Rossotti took the helm of the IRS in November 1997, the agency adopted a new mission statement: "Provide America's taxpayers top quality service by helping them understand and meet their tax responsibilities and by applying the tax law with integrity and fairness to all." To see this vision become a reality, Rossotti and his top executives will have to persuade 98,000 full-time employees and 15,000 part-timers to assist taxpayers rather than punish them.

Rossotti must also find the answer to this question: How can the IRS offer customer service on the scale of leading-edge American companies and yet still perform its central function of extracting $1.7 trillion in taxes annually from taxpayers who aren't thrilled to be giving up their hard-earned money?

Taxpayer Service

The fast, effective customer service now displayed by many American companies, especially those that are using the Internet to its full advantage, has raised the bar in terms of the expectations of how the IRS and other federal agencies relate to the people they serve.

"My view is that the American public has not only asked the IRS to change but asked all public agencies to change," says Bob Wenzel, deputy commissioner of operations for IRS, who joined the agency in 1963 and now oversees customer service, compliance and criminal investigations. While most Americans accept paying their fair share of taxes, they expect "federal agencies to give them the best product and service," Wenzel says.

That's hard for an agency that has long defined itself in terms of tax collection. "Previously the IRS measured success by its collection revenue," says Eugene Steuerle, a former deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury and now a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank. Of course, he notes, the main reason the agency did so is because that's what Congress wanted it to do. During the era of high budget deficits, Congress dictated that the IRS maximize the amount of revenue it collected. Now that the deficit has been reduced, the pendulum has swung to a new focus on assisting taxpayers.

How antagonistic was the IRS in the past toward taxpayers? "The outlook of many agents was 'I'm going to get you,' " says Sharon Cranford, director of government relations and public affairs at the National Association of Enrolled Agents (NAEA), which represents 10,000 of the 35,000 licensed private-sector federal tax practitioners. "IRS agents saw taxpayers as adversarial. Further, if the IRS did something wrong, such as distributing incorrect forms, they would deny they were responsible for the mistake."

"The IRS has operated as an insular, secretive agency. It is more secretive than the CIA," says Chris Bergin, editor of Tax Notes, a weekly journal.

Instead of being forced to relinquish property or take out a home-equity loan, the delinquent taxpayer under the new IRS approach has several options, including paying on the installment plan, much like paying off a credit card balance. "Now I ask the taxpayer what he or she wants," says Caputo, who prefers the new approach. If a taxpayer has lost his or her job or is suffering from a long-term illness and has no history of avoiding payments, the IRS can design a hardship installment payment. But if the taxpayer has a chronic problem with paying what he or she owes, the IRS will demand payment or start criminal procedures.

Customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and business results will serve as the three critical elements in measuring the performance of IRS employees under the new system, says Jamie Kavanaugh, a vice president at Booz-Allen & Hamilton, the management consulting firm that's helping to implement the new system. "If you want effective business results, you need to satisfy taxpayers and you need to have employees satisfied," she says.

The new approach requires IRS managers to use new approaches to solving problems. For example, at tax filing season, when phones are ringing off the hook, should a manager shift employees away from their regular duties to handle customer queries over the phone? What if that causes delays in other areas? "We're trying to get IRS employees to think about how they manage to achieve their overall goal, which is revenue collection," Kavanaugh says.

In order to improve customer service, the IRS is modernizing its antiquated computer systems, which have been a source of frustration and complaints for years. For example, if a taxpayer had a question about a tax payment, he or she often would have to wait several days for a response while an IRS agent researched as many as seven different databases.

The agency, however, is taking a cautious approach to information technology improvements, because it has previously spent $4 billion on systems that failed to meet its needs. The 1998 IRS Reform and Restructuring Act authorized $506 million for modernization efforts, and the IRS has hired Computer Sciences Corp., a management consulting and information technology company, to begin the effort. "We're building a central database that will provide a single repository, an entire tax history," says Don Brown, a CSC program executive. When completed by the year 2002, the new system will enable customer service representatives to answer almost any taxpayer question quickly and easily.

The IRS has also launched a telephone information hot line that operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, like General Electric's respected consumer hot line. To be more responsive to taxpayers, 250 of the agency's offices are now open on Saturday mornings. Brochures and pamphlets are being rewritten in plain language. More than 25 percent of taxpayers are filing returns electronically, and the service is aiming for 80 percent electronic filing by 2007. IRS employees will be participating in a new training program called Worldwide Customer Service, which Wenzel describes as "offering the best of the private and public sector to educate our workforce on how to interact with taxpayers."

Customer Culture

But training alone will not transform the IRS culture. The IRS also is undergoing a major restructuring. Charles Baugh, director of the agency's New York office, which has 1,750 employees, says the IRS' new alignment "revolves around meeting customer and taxpayer needs."

The IRS' 33 regional offices will disappear, as will the jobs of the people who head them. In its new structure, the agency is divided into four specialty areas-taxpayers with wage and investment income, small businesses and the self-employed, mid-to-large businesses, and tax-exempt organizations. "We're becoming specialists, not generalists," Baugh says. For example, in New York, small-business specialists will become adept at answering the questions of taxicab drivers and beauty salon operators, while in Northern California they will learn to deal with questions posed by vineyard owners.

To help make sure the agency maintains its customer focus, Congress created the job of national taxpayer advocate in the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act. Val Overson, the new advocate, explains his mission this way: "Resolving taxpayers' problems with the IRS, analyzing why these problems occur, and then recommending solutions through administrative or statutory changes." The taxpayer advocate operates independently of the IRS commissioner and the Treasury Secretary and has the authority to make recommendations for legislation directly to Congress.

Overson notes that 70 percent of the problems raised by taxpayers involve procedural errors or snafus such as misapplied payments, which he expects to resolve. He is hiring GS-15 managers dedicated to customer service. Overson will oversee 1,700 employees in 76 locations and is seeking employees who exhibit "a willingness to work with taxpayers, listen to their concerns and help them find solutions." The new law even grants the taxpayer advocate the ability to determine compensation for a taxpayer who is "suffering a significant hardship as a result of the manner in which internal revenue laws are administered."

To protect taxpayers from abuses, the IRS Act designated 10 actions (known to employees as the "10 Deadly Sins") for which employees can be fired. The actions include violating a citizen's civil rights, threatening a taxpayer during an audit for personal gain, and destroying documents to hide mistakes. Currently 240 IRS employees are under investigation for abuses, but none has been dismissed or otherwise penalized.

Nonetheless, the fear of reprisals from taxpayer complaints has sent a shudder through the 40 percent of IRS employees involved in audits and collections. Some of the actions on the list "are so broad that they freeze enforcement personnel in their tracks," wrote Donald C. Alexander, IRS commissioner from 1973 to 1977, in an article in Tax Notes earlier this year. "How can an IRS front-line employee or manager with examination or, particularly, collection responsibilities, be certain that he or she has not unknowingly violated some provision of an unfamiliar law in the course of an examination or enforcement action?"

Indeed, specific types of collections have plummeted recently. For example, in the past two years, seizures of property have dropped by 98 percent, garnishments of bank accounts and paychecks are down by 75 percent, and tax liens have diminished by two-thirds. Shifting auditors and collection personnel into customer service was a factor in collection reductions, but fear of reprisal is contributing to the situation.

The IRS sees the drop-off in collections as a temporary response while it clarifies its goals, trains its new staff and updates its guidelines. Once employees see that few dismissals will actually occur and procedures are rolled out that clarify how to deal with complaints and allegations, then seizures, garnishments and tax liens will rise, Baugh predicts. The agency is on target to meet its overall projection of collecting almost $1.7 trillion in 1999, IRS officials note.

"Our role is to sort out the 95 percent or more of 250 million taxpayers who are good citizens and want to comply with tax laws from the million or so who don't want to comply and should be treated with enforcement action," says Baugh. But "getting 100,000 [employees] to think differently isn't easy," he admits. Making an arrangement with a taxpayer to accept a $10,000 "offer in compromise" on a tax debt of $50,000 is much trickier than simply demanding, "pay up or else," he says. Under the new IRS approach, taxpayers can make arrangements by phone or correspondence to pay debts of up to $25,000 over a five-year period.

Christopher Clonan, a New York-based IRS revenue officer who specializes in offers in compromise, welcomes the culture change. In the past, enforcement action was a revenue officer's only option. Now, "if there's a hardship, we can take a more liberal approach," he says. "If a taxpayer cannot pay $25,000, we can accept less. We can now accept an offer even if they're not yielding equity in a house." In the past, the IRS accepted few offers in compromise, but last year the agency arranged more than 25,000 such deals, leading to a total of $290 million in collections.

Better Business

Not everyone is sure that the IRS can forge a new culture. Shelley Davis, who served for eight years as IRS historian and then wrote the scathing Unbridled Power: Inside the Secret Culture of the IRS (HarperBusiness, 1997), says entrenched unionized employees historically simply give lip service to efforts to overhaul the IRS, then wait for a new commissioner to be selected or Congress to change its tune. "The IRS staff counts on public interest waxing and waning. We'll have congressional hearings, followed by headlines of abuses of taxpayers, followed by IRS pledges to do better, followed by a new cycle in three years," says Davis.

Alexander argues that it's unfair to hold the IRS to the same standard as private companies in terms of customer service. The IRS, he notes, can't simply allow some of its customers to opt out of doing business with the agency-or refuse to do business with troublesome taxpayers. What's more, he says, the agency doesn't control its own resources. Congress decides how much money the agency will get every year and often micromanages how it will be spent. In the IRS' fiscal 1999 appropriations measure, for example, the agency was ordered not to reduce the number of criminal investigators in South Dakota and Wisconsin.

"Moreover," Alexander wrote in Tax Notes, "the claim that the IRS must rise to the standard of the best customer service practices in industry fails to recognize that the IRS has to administer an ever-changing law and that Congress regularly adds new and complex burdens."

Still, many IRS executives-and the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents agency employees-are on record supporting the new approach. IRS employees "welcome the opportunity to be evaluated in terms of the quality of work they produce and service they provide to taxpayers, rather than on revenue," says former NTEU president Robert M. Tobias.

Revenue officer Clonan, who was recently promoted to manager in a New Jersey IRS office, says that a day rarely goes by that he doesn't receive a voice mail message introducing a new customer service initiative. Training efforts, new guidelines and explicit directives from executives at staff meetings, he says, indicate the new approach is here to stay. "They've had flavors of the month before, but nothing has been introduced on this large a scale," Clonan says. "The agency is making a major commitment to modernization and customer service. People are bracing for a change." Clonan acknowledges, however, that not all of his colleagues are as open to change as he is.

Customers of the IRS say the agency is making strides but has a long way to go. Peter Sepp, vice president of communications at the National Taxpayers Union, a non-profit organization representing 300,000 taxpayers, says the agency has already implemented improvements such as extended hours during tax filing season, new guidelines evaluating employees on customer service, more attentive service at call centers and increased protection of taxpayer rights. Still, he'd like to see taxpayers receive more information on alternative payment options. If the IRS is to change its culture, "it will require full cooperation with the employee's union and a climate of trust between the director and the lower rank-and-file employees," Sepp says.

The message that is being conveyed to long-term IRS employees who are resistant to change, says NAEA's Cranford, is: "This is not the IRS you joined. If you're not interested in customer service, it will be an uncomfortable place to work."

The culture shift at the IRS is about more than just changing employee attitudes and making taxpayers feel better, says Kavanaugh. It is about improving the bottom line. "If the IRS can deliver taxpayers the information they need, people will be filing more accurately," she argues. "Collections will increase because of the accuracy and fewer delays. An emphasis on taxpayer service will lead to better business results."

Gary M. Stern is a New York City freelance writer who contributes to Reuters, American Way, Continental, Consumer Reports Travel Letter, BizTravel and other publications.

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Big Apple Blues

Gary M. Stern — Sat, 01 May 1999 00:00:00 -0400

Agencies in and around New York City are finding it difficult to attract and retain quality employees.

By Gary M. Stern

hen James Gaither, then assistant division chief of the Internal Revenue Service's Memphis office, graduated from the IRS' executive program in 1998, he resisted transferring to the New York area. "The high cost of living was my major concern," he says. But a position as assistant director at the IRS' Brookhaven Service Center on Long Island proved so appealing that Gaither accepted the assignment and moved his family from Memphis to Suffolk County, N.Y., at the beginning of this year.

Since starting the job, Gaither has watched his take-home pay decline, despite Long Island's 10.3 percent locality pay differential, which is three times higher than the differential in Memphis. His take-home pay decreased by $200 a month after the high state and local income taxes were deducted. He bought a 2,400-square-foot home in Suffolk for $260,000 that was comparable to a $99,000 house in Memphis. He shells out $5.50 for a fast-food lunch that cost $4 in Memphis, pays $25 a month for his cellular phone instead of $18, and spends an additional 10 cents a gallon for premium gas.

Of the 31 federal agencies that participated in an October 1998 survey by the New York Federal Executive Board, 24 reported significant recruitment and retention problems. Federal agencies "can't compete in this boom economy, particularly in New York with Wall Street," says Susan Kossin, executive director of the board, which coordinates interdepartmental activities among 140 federal agencies in the New York metropolitan area. "Anyone with a good degree does not want to work for us, because salaries aren't competitive. Our salaries are 30 to 40 percent behind market rates."

Skilled employees in medicine, law enforcement and computers are difficult to attract, and, if hired, they are hard to retain, Kossin says. Currently there are shortages of medical technicians, computer specialists and attorneys. "We have virtually zero ability to get people to relocate from other parts of the country from within the federal government," she says. "Even with locality pay, our salaries aren't competitive."

Ten years ago, the New York Federal Executive Board issued a report loaded with statistics about how federal workers in the region earned less than private workers and less than their federal colleagues in other areas due to New York's higher cost of living. The 1998 report has fewer statistics but more anecdotes on labor shortages. "In 1998, the issue is not about vacancies, because the government has downsized [from about 70,000 employees to 40,000 in New York]. It's becoming a quality issue," says Kossin.

Not in the Ballpark

At Veterans Affairs Department hospitals, positions as medical record coders and physical therapists remain vacant because federal pay scales cannot keep up with escalating private sector salaries. A VA hospital director earns half of what directors of private hospitals in the region earn, Kossin says. Likewise, employees in such specialties as legal support and computers can earn more at private firms.

"If the private sector is paying $50,000 for a computer programmer and we're paying $32,000, we're dead," Kossin says. "We're not even in the ballpark."

Unable to fill vacancies, agencies are forced to hire temporary or contract employees, paying more in fees than they would have to pay in salaries for full-time staff. Most temps are hired to repair computers, install and support new hardware and software, provide help desk services, and perform data input, bookkeeping and accounting tasks.

When jobs go unfilled, the remaining employees are stretched beyond their normal responsibilities and suffer from burnout or low morale. "Professionals sometimes have to cover other functions and perform quasi-clerical duties, or the work just doesn't get done," Kossin says.

Officials at the Securities and Exchange Commission say they are able to hire first-year lawyers who crave experience despite lower pay scales, but the SEC has difficulty holding onto them for more than a couple of years. For lawyers with three or more years' experience, the SEC pays a third to a half of what Wall Street firms pay. The Securities Professional Pay Differential, a special pay rate granted to the SEC by the Office of Personnel Management, has been slashed and can't compensate for the difference, explains Carmen Lawrence, director of the SEC's Northeast Regional Office in New York. So many lawyers leave for higher pay after three years that the SEC is continually playing catch-up to fill vacancies and recruit experienced lawyers. As a result, supervisors are continually training new people and cases are frequently delayed while new attorneys become familiar with them.

In 1998, the FBI was 100 agents below its full staffing level in the New York office, says Carson Dunbar, special agent in charge of administration there. Since many agents begin their careers at around age 30 and are former attorneys, accountants or police officers, the $50,000 starting salary in New York isn't very attractive.

FBI and law enforcement personnel in select cities also receive a special pay differential, which in New York is General Schedule pay plus 16 percent.

The New York office handles some of the most complex cases in the country, including Wall Street fraud, terrorism and organized crime, yet 60 percent of its investigators have fewer than four years' experience. Many FBI agents are assigned to New York against their wishes, creating morale problems. Often, New York agents transfer to other FBI offices after two to three years. "If people don't feel that they are adequately compensated, it's hard to keep them motivated," Dunbar says.

The Federal Aviation Administration has had a difficult time attracting air traffic controllers to New York. A first-year air controller earning $22,700 in New York would have a hard time meeting living expenses compared to one living in Kansas City on a $21,900 salary, notes Manny Weiss, regional executive manager of the FAA's Eastern Region. "The little bit of difference in salary does not make up for the difference of costs. When you add on commuting time and schooling, we have a difficult time attracting air controllers," Weiss says.

Carol Landy, director of the IRS, Brookhaven Service Center, has a similar problem. "It's very difficult to attract people to apply for jobs from outside the New York area," she says. "In my five years here, I've only picked up two division heads who shifted from outside the area." Despite crime reductions, New York still has the reputation of being a "rough-and-tumble town, with high crime and an ineffective school system," Kossin says. The result of having so few employees relocate, Landy says, is "limiting your recruitment pool, as well as less creativity and lack of exposure to better ideas that might have been done in other offices."

Pushing for Pay

New York and other high-cost cities were supposed to get help with recruitment and retention problems through the 1990 Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act (FEPCA), which was designed to close pay gaps with the non-federal sector in localities around the country by 2003.

FEPCA has not worked. The Clinton administration has used a loophole in the law to issue smaller raises than FEPCA recommends each year because it believes the FEPCA methodology is flawed and because it wants to hold down federal spending. For example, the FEPCA formula called for a 13 percent average raise in 1999. Instead, President Clinton issued a 3.6 percent average raise.

Moreover, New York's high cost of living is not even considered in allocating pay differentials, which are instead based on the costs of labor in various localities. As of March 1998, the Bureau of Labor Statistics had calculated that New York ranks fourth behind San Francisco, Los Angeles and Houston. "We don't take into account living costs in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Key West or anywhere," says an OPM official.

OPM argues that agencies in New York are not employing all of the weapons in their arsenal to offer employees pay incentives. Agencies can offer recruitment bonuses of up to 25 percent of annual pay for a difficult-to-fill position, relocation bonuses of 25 percent of salary to attract an employee from another region, and retention increases if someone is offered additional pay in the private sector.

But Robert M. Tobias, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents more than 8,000 federal employees in the New York area, calls these measures "Band-Aids, not a solution."

The real answer, he says, is obeying the intent of FEPCA and "writing the checks." Tobias adds that since 1993, downsizing has shielded the federal government from the recruiting problem, "but now it will go back into the market to hire people and won't be able to compete for the quality of employees necessary to carry out public tasks."

Special inducements may have an effect when an agency is trying to hire a single specialist in a hard-to-fill slot, but the FAA's Weiss notes that his agency can't offer such incentives to 20 or more air controllers at a time. FAA often must hire at that pace, because it has more than 700 controllers at its various airports and control centers in the New York area. Moreover, last year's Federal Executive Board report noted that 21 of 32 agencies are not authorized to offer recruitment bonuses without approval from headquarters. "If we're recruiting 100 staff, we are not going to pay them a $25,000 bonus each," Kossin says.

Because pay is low, applicants for federal jobs often are unqualified. In fact, more than 30 percent of the people who took the clerk test at the Brookhaven IRS Service Center failed. When it comes to computer specialists, the FBI's only options are to take "C students who are not as attractive to business or hire people with little experience," says Dunbar.

Aware of the difficulties that agencies in New York and other high-cost areas face, the House Government Reform Subcommittee on the Civil Service pushed a bill in 1996 that "grants agencies flexibility in hiring and compensating their workforce," says George Nesterczuk, the subcommittee's staff director. The House passed the bill, but the Senate failed to act on it. Earlier this year, Vice President Al Gore said the Clinton administration would propose a civil service reform package that would tie pay raises to performance instead of allowing automatic seniority increases, permit agencies to replace the General Schedule with broad-banding pay systems, and streamline hiring procedures.

It's unlikely, however, in an era of continued downsizing that Congress or the administration will push to increase pay dramatically in any area. Since OPM can authorize special rates for geographic hardship or problem occupations, the "problem can be dealt with administratively and is not a legislative crisis," Nesterczuk says.

Other Options

Several agencies do make use of special pay provisions. VA hospitals, for example, offer additional pay to physicians, dentists and nurses in scarce specialties. For example, the hospitals can add $15,000 to the $105,000 base salary for a primary care physician coming out of medical school. After 15 years on staff, physicians' salaries can rise by $25,000 to $30,000, making their pay more competitive with private hospitals. "Federal guidelines reward physicians who stay here longer," says John Donnellan, director of the VA Harbor New York Healthcare System, which consists of two VA hospitals in Brooklyn and Manhattan and one VA clinic in Queens.

Nevertheless, Donnellan fears that if the job shortages continue, VA hospitals will fall behind private hospitals in technology. "Health care is driven by technology," he says. Since the VA is committed to computerizing its medical records and using technology to help improve patient care, it will fall behind other hospitals if it is unable to hire computer specialists and medical coders.

The VA is able to offer employees an opportunity for public service that private hospitals can't match. And the relationship that two New York-area VA hospitals have with medical schools at New York University and Mt. Sinai Medical Center helps attract doctors who want to teach. But it's still tough to compete with private hospitals offering $20,000 more in pay, Donnellan says.

Unable to compete on the basis of salary, agencies are becoming more flexible to attract skilled employees. Rather than expecting employees to work for 40 years, some agencies are reengineering operations and hiring employees with the expectation that they'll leave after one or two years. For the VA, "another option is moving toward hiring more independent contractors in computer fields or with physical therapists," Donnellan says.

Job shortages have also led agencies to redistribute their workloads. VA hospitals have been employing four-day workweeks with 12-hour shifts to make jobs more appealing. The FAA recently signed an agreement with the private College of Aeronautics located near LaGuardia Airport to supply it with air controllers. Students who pass the school's certified program can bypass the FAA air control exam and be hired directly. "This will enable us to hire local people" and not have to recruit nationally, Weiss says.

Despite the impediments to working on a federal salary in New York, some federal professionals have decided to make the leap. For example, in 1994, Dr. Joyce Rico, who had been on the faculty of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., moved with her husband-who is also a physician-and their two children to become chief of dermatology at the VA Harbor New York Healthcare System. She transferred because of the opportunity to teach at New York University's well-regarded dermatology department.

Though Rico's 70-minute commute from suburban Westchester County to Manhattan is more than an hour longer than her Durham commute, she is glad she moved to New York. "My children, who are adopted and interracial, live in a more heterogeneous environment," she says. "In Durham, people stopped and looked at us. In New York, no one does." Her children attend Wynton Marsalis' jazz concerts at Lincoln Center and already have seen 10 Broadway plays. "The social and cultural opportunities in New York may compensate for some of the hassles of
living in the city," she says.

The key to making sure that people like Rico continue to take federal jobs in New York is making the federal compensation system more flexible, Kossin says. That could include fully implementing FEPCA, setting up pay differentials based on cost of living, increasing the number of special salary rates, abolishing clerical tests for new hires and granting agencies more authority to hire without approval from headquarters.

"Making salaries more competitive with the private sector is critical," Kossin says.

As the average age of the federal workforce nears 45, retirements in senior positions are expected to increase. "If we're not bringing in quality, well-educated people to do the work, where are we going to find them?" Kossin wonders. "We can't get them from other parts of the country, and we can't recruit them locally."

Gary M. Stern is a New York City freelance writer who contributes to Reuters, American Way, Continental, Consumer Reports Travel Letter, BizTravel and other publications.

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