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Prime Times Weekly feature of the Mail Tribune , Medford, Oregon A BOON to TAXPAYERS Photo by Jim Craven Margaret Drescher and her husband, Tom, walk together in the village at Rogue Valley Manor. After a stint with the CIA and as a tax preparer, Margaret Drescher has devoted her life to volunteering to help others. Rogue Valley Manor's Margaret Drescher, a longtime Tax Aide and civic volunteer, was a CIA geographer in the early 1950s when the Cold War was at its height By JOHN DARLING Back in the early 1950s, when Margaret Drescher got home from work, she never talked with her husband about her day at the office. Now, a half-century later and living at Rogue Valley Manor, she still hasn't discussed it. She never will. She was working for the CIA, one of the few women in the super-secret spy agency in the early Cold War and one of the few geographers employed in the whole country. "It's all classified," she said, smiling. Now a nationally recognized pioneer of electronic tax filing and indefatigable community volunteer, Drescher, 68, researched for the CIA, organizing intelligence from newspapers, magazines and field reports to present an accurate political and military picture of many nations "for those who needed it" and, occasionally, for federal agencies and Congress. "It was very exciting work. World War II taught us that we knew a lot about America, but needed to know much more about the world and its people, the customs, agriculture, topography, transportation, everything," she said. Drescher graduated in 1952 with a geography and political science degree from Valparaiso University in Indiana. "The CIA was the only place a geographer could get a job in the early fifties. People didn't yet recognize it as a profession," she said. After three years with the CIA, Drescher moved on to substitute teaching and raising three children, while her husband, Tom, worked in the Defense Department. Inspired by a suggestion from Tom, she took a course from H&R Block on how to do taxes. The firm hired her and she worked eight years there. When they moved to Lincoln City on the Central Oregon Coast in 1983, Drescher volunteered at the library as an indexer of local newspapers. She found that non-city dwellers in Lincoln County were being charged $50 a year for a library card, while services were free to city residents. Drescher decided to change all that, launching a ballot measure to set up a county tax base. The campaign, which she chaired, won on the second try and now the county's libraries are open to all. "Margaret was always cheerful and positive," said Lincoln County Library Director Sue Jenkins. "She's very literate and civic-minded and always put her full effort into the project. If she said she'd be there and do it, it got done." When Drescher was doing taxes for a living, she "hated to charge people so much for it" and promised herself she'd find a way to do it free. In Lincoln County she joined Tax Aide, a network of free tax helpers sponsored by the American Association of Retired Persons. Soon she was director of the effort in the county, then the region of several counties, then the state of Oregon and finally six Northwest states. After the Dreschers moved to Rogue Valley Manor in 1996, her pastor at Ascension Lutheran Church, Bob Larson, asked her what she does for fun. "I do taxes," she said. He invited her to set up a Tax Aide station in the church, now the biggest in the Rogue Valley. "Our specialty is to calm down the anxious taxpayer and to show them help is at hand," she said. Drescher recounts the story of one woman who was "sure she owed lots of money" but, after Tax Aide, received a $4,000 refund. "She shrieked out loud. There were sure a lot of smiles around here that day." In the mid-1990s, it became the goal of the IRS and Drescher to reduce paper and labor by promoting filing on the Internet. The IRS appointed her to its Citizens Advisory Committee for Electronic Tax Administration, which finds ways to reach the IRS goal of 80 percent Internet filing by 2007. It reports its findings and recommendations to Congress every June. Every day, Drescher takes a clutch of diskettes home from her Tax Aide site and files them herself. "I really enjoy it," she said. "Electronic filing gets rid of mounds of paper and reduces the error rate from 20 percent to 1 percent. Refunds arrive in half the time." It must be working. Electronic returns at her Tax Aide site in the last four years, she said, progressed from 150 to 1,000, then 1,500 last year and an expected 2,000 this year. Prime Times Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA