In memoriam.

• Author: O'Brien, Thomas
• Position: Roscoe L. Egger

ROSCOE L. EGGER, Jr., 79, Commissioner of Internal from 1981 to 1986 and recipient of TEI's Distinguished Service Award in 1986, died Oct. 14 following heart surgery at the Mayo Clinic.

Mr. Egger was a partner in the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse before and after his IRS service. As Commissioner, he helped draft the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which included legislation to simplify the tax code. He was also a proponent of IRS computer modernization. When problems hit the IRS in 1985 -- millions of returns were lost and it took far longer to process refunds than it had in the past -- he responded by increasing the number of computers at some Service Centers by up to 50 percent and boosting the number of central computers in operation across the country. In a 1990 interview, Mr. Egger noted that the IRS's computer systems were still inadequate, and needed to be changed from the ground up.

Mr. Egger was a native of Jackson, Michigan, and a graduate of Indiana University. He received a law degree from George Washington University after serving in the Army in Europe during World War II. He received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. Before and after serving as Commissioner, Mr. Egger was a partner with Price Waterhouse.

SINGLETON B. WOLFE, former IRS Assistant Commissioner for Compliance and recipient of TEI's Distinguished Service Award in 1980, passed away November 11. He was 80. "Sing" Wolfe began his IRS career as a revenue agent in Knoxville, Tennessee, shortly after World War II. In 1975, IRS Commissioner Donald C. Alexander named Wolfe to be the agency's top compliance officer -- "one of the best appointments I was ever responsible for," Alexander later said. In between, Mr. Wolfe built a reputation as a savvy technical tax man and humanist who never lost sight of the fact that there were faces and lives behind those tax returns.

In 1980, during an interview that appeared in the Legal Times of Washington, Mr. Wolfe recounted a story about a taxpayer in Atlanta whose case he became involved in --

Seems that the IRS office down in...