Catherine Hester

My typical day involves managing remote and hybrid teams spread across North Carolina through virtual meetings where we discuss our plans for the week and coordinate ongoing projects. I'm responsible for tracking and assigning work not just to my unit, but for about 108 employees currently in the Taxpayer Assistance and Collections Division at the North Carolina Department of Revenue. We take an all-hands-on-deck approach to special projects, and I spend a good part of my day sorting and filtering data to distribute work to over 100 employees through their managers. I handle technical troubleshooting for my team and help them find resolutions for taxpayer issues, which requires extensive research using different databases to find the best options for each situation. On the personnel side, I review and approve time statements weekly for both contract workers who get paid every two weeks and permanent employees who get paid monthly. I manage 6 full-time employees including a team leader, plus 12 part-time employees who report directly to me. My special projects team handles referrals that come into the Department, manages cases requiring extra assistance or research, and determines whether aged balances are good debt or bad debt based on North Carolina general statutes. Right now we have 10 years to collect on a balance unless there's a reason to pause that timeframe, so we carefully manage older cases as they approach the 10-year mark. Beyond the day-to-day work, I'm most proud of building my team from the ground up, designing the virtual infrastructure, workflow, SOPs, and work guides all from scratch, and creating processes that run so smoothly that new hires are blown away by how organized everything is.