Hoyle's rules.

• Author: Mooneyham, Scott
• Position: CAPITALGOODS

Now David Hoyle gets to see what it's like on the other side. For more than a decade, he has been one of North Carolina's most powerful legislators. As the longtime co-chair of the Senate Finance Committee, he has been in the middle of most of the recent debates over tax policy, but he recently decided to give it all up, opting not to run for another term. Then the unexpected happened. Frustrated by a series of politically unpopular decisions coming from her Department of Revenue, Gov. Beverly Perdue came calling. She more or less sacked Secretary Ken Lay (not the Enron guy) and persuaded Hoyle to take the job. It's an interesting choice--one that promises to offer plenty of entertainment for political watchers--for a variety of reasons.

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Hoyle at times has been among the department's harshest critics, even though it has been run by fellow Democrats. Then again, Hoyle is hardly a typical Democrat. In Connecticut or Massachusetts, he'd be a Republican. A developer with worldwide business interests, he was consistently ranked among the state's most business-friendly legislators. A few years ago, he took on the department when it was cracking down on sales-tax collections from bakers, cabinetmakers, interior designers and other small-business owners. They claimed the tax man was using broad interpretations of the law to force them to collect the tax for services instead of goods. Hoyle helped rewrite the law to win concessions for them.

But he's not the champion of business everywhere. More recently, he led the charge to try to force Seattle-based Amazon.com and other out-of-state Internet retailers to collect North Carolina sales tax. Amazon countered by ending an affiliate sales program with North Carolina-based businesses. Hoyle's attitude: Let 'em leave. Then when Amazon sued: Let 'em sue. He argued that the state had a responsibility to its brick-and-mortar merchants and needed to treat all retailers the same. Out there on the West Coast, some execs may not be so happy with this development at the North Carolina Department of Revenue. But Hoyle wasn't brought in to make out-of-state taxpayers happy. It's the folks back home that Perdue needs to placate. Under Lay, the Department of Revenue had made more than a few enemies.

Of course, nobody likes paying taxes or, for that matter, the tax man. Going into the job, Lay, a former Bank of America executive from Charlotte, knew he wasn't entering a popularity contest...