Profile: Jeff Feist

Auditor

Jeff Feist, an auditor with the North Dakota Department of Transportation, is making sure his state and others are getting their fuel tax revenues from interstate truckers.

Most of Feist’s time is spent on International Fuel Tax Association (IFTA) audits and International Registration Plan (IRP) audits. The job particulars may be esoteric, but the revenue to state coffers for infrastructure projects is not.

“Millions of dollars in fuel tax come into North Dakota through the IFTA-IRP groups,” says Feist.

Under IFTA, a cooperative agreement among U.S. state governments, Canadian provinces and trucking firms, each state and province is responsible for auditing at least 3 percent of the carriers, whose base registration is in their jurisdiction, for all the jurisdictions the truckers have traveled in. The audits ensure that each jurisdiction receives fuel taxes for the number of miles a trucker has driven in each jurisdiction.

“It gets interesting when truckers go into 48 jurisdictions with 48 different tax rates,” says Feist, a member of the North Dakota Public Employees Association, “and that is the simple part of the job.”