At the ripe old age of 21, he’s advising the IRS on change

As a preteen, one of Aidan Hunt’s favorite times of year was the day after his father filed taxes. That was when he was allowed to play with the software his dad used.

“After he had finished using it, I would just make some different returns and try out the different options and see what they did,” Hunt, who recently turned 21, said in an interview with the JofA. “You could say I was interested in seeing the different forms that would produce when you check all the different options. I just thought it was cool how many different forms and lines and possibilities that there were.”

In January, Hunt was appointed as one of nine new members of the IRS Advisory Council (IRSAC), which advises the commissioner and recommends administrative and policy changes for the Service. Among the partners, directors, and attorneys included among the 33 IRSAC members, Hunt’s bio stood out: “Student, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.”

No IRSAC seat is reserved for a student, and IRS officials cannot recall another being appointed since the committee was formed in 1953. On his LinkedIn page, Hunt describes himself “as the first college student and member of Generation Z to serve on the council in its 70 years. I hope to bring a unique perspective on how the IRS can better connect with and inform young Americans and students about their tax responsibilities and benefits.”

An early interest

Hunt grew up in Greensboro, N.C., and attended early college, meaning that half his classes were at the high school level and the other half were at Guilford College. He then attended UNC-Chapel Hill for three years, graduating in May with a degree in computer science and linguistics.

Although Hunt is pursuing either an IT/software career or one that connects tax with government or policy sectors and not one as a CPA, his interest in accounting plays out in his volunteer work with the IRS’s Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program.

And of course, it shows in Hunt’s volunteer work with IRSAC, which has met three times since he was appointed to a three-year term. He said he applied for the council because he thought it needed the diversity of a younger person with a different point of view than the older members who typically serve.

“I was interested in some of the issues that were coming up, things like the 1099-K issues, that primarily younger people are participating in,” he said. The other IRSAC members seem intrigued that a young person is interested in IRS issues, “especially because a lot of times, these [issues] get labeled as boring and you think younger people wouldn’t be interested in them,” he said. “I think they’re really excited to see that.”

John Kelshaw, a 40-year IRS employee and former director of tax compliance at Jackson Hewitt, agreed with that assessment.

“It’s been really interesting getting to know him and talk to him,” said Kelshaw, also a new IRSAC member and who serves on IRSAC’s small business/self-employed subgroup with Hunt. “I’m 62 — I’ve been around the block for a while, and you don’t really see a lot of young people who are interested in the VITA program and helping other people or getting involved in tax law stuff at his age. It’s interesting to get his perspective from somebody his age regarding the tax industry and helping other people.”

The chair of that subgroup, attorney Steve Klitzner, was a little dubious when he read Hunt’s bio. “When I saw it, I was like, is he in my group? Hold on. I need to find out more about this guy. But I’m very happy with him being in our group,” said Klitzner, whose practice specializes in resolving taxpayer disputes with the IRS.

“This isn’t just any young person,” he said. “He’s got the intelligence. He does have some background. He has a lot of knowledge. He does have a lot of life experience and knowledge that you don’t see with a typical 21-year-old.”

A new perspective

Hunt brings the perspective of viewing one of the IRS’s roles as a “benefits agency” because it issues payments for credits such as the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit — money that many need to survive.

That role will be especially important as the IRS moves through its modern digitization process, he said. “It’s delivering these benefits to people so that’s just one more of the many reasons why this is a critical part of the government and why it’s important to invest in the IRS,” he said.

It was especially rewarding to help VITA clients who were owed additional benefits because of stimulus money issued during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.

“Part of my role is helping people qualify for those benefits,” Hunt said. “That’s how you get your income credit is by filing a tax return, and so just like you’d have people at the Medicaid office or something to help them navigate that process, we’re helping people get their earned income credit, get their child tax credit. It was really good to be volunteering during that time when we had those stimulus. That was a really critical service to be helping connect people with those benefits.”

IRSAC members sign nondisclosure agreements that mean they cannot talk publicly about their discussions until they issue a report in November. However, Hunt discussed broadly some of the issues that interested him before he was appointed to IRSAC.

For example, the change in the reporting threshold for Form 1099-K, Payment Card and Third Party Network Transactions, from $20,000 to $600, which was enacted as part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, P.L. 117-2, and was supposed to go into effect for the 2022 calendar year before the IRS delayed it for a year. Hunt is less interested in the politics of the change than in making sure that taxpayers know how it would affect them.

“I think the question is really more about people who are getting this form, do they know what they need to do, do they know how to interpret it,” he said. “A lot of people view these apps as a different category than say, owning a taxi company, even though the tax law treats them pretty similarly. You have to know your mileage; you have to know your expenses. They think about it like, I got on this app, and I got some money. …They’re getting this number at the end of the year, and they think they have to pay taxes on the whole number because that’s the way things like their W-2 work.”

A helping hand

Hunt said he hopes that young people will follow his lead and volunteer with the VITA program, where he has helped people who might otherwise have missed out on tax breaks that they were owed — or are simply nervous about filing taxes on their own.

It has been particularly rewarding to help those with low incomes who otherwise might have to pay for a tax program they could not really afford, parents trying to untangle the maze of how to declare their children’s scholarships, and people with questions about retirement accounts.

“The scholarships are treated as earned income for one calculation, but unearned income for another, so you really have to understand how all that works to figure out how to make it work best for the client,” he said. “There have been a lot of clients who say that [VITA] has really significantly taken a burden off of them or helped them get through something that for them might seem quite stressful.”

It is puzzling, perhaps, that someone with so much insight into and interest in the complicated U.S. tax system is aiming for a career in IT instead of in accounting. But Klitzner said there’s still hope — and his optimism is rooted in Hunt’s age.

“He’s young,” Klitzner said. “You never know where he’s going to end up.”

— To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Martha Waggoner at Martha.Waggoner@aicpa-cima.com.