Finish Iowans’ Tax Returns In 30 Days? New Director Say That’s ‘achievable’

DES MOINES — Kraig Paulsen, a former Republican speaker of the Iowa House who represented Hiawatha in the Iowa House for 14 years, has spent about five months in a new executive-branch assignment as Gov. Kim Reynolds’ director of the Iowa Department of Revenue.As overseer of the state’s tax collecting and revenue dispensing agency, Paulsen, 54, is in charge of nearly 300 state employees who are responsible for allocating about $10.4 billion in funding, processing nearly 2 million state income tax returns, managing tax receipts in areas of sales, property and commerce around Iowa and supervising about 95 percent of the revenue collected by government entities statewide.“There’s a fair amount of money that we’re responsible for administering correctly,” Paulsen said in an interview.