IRS is becoming offensive ... in college recruiting. Lifestyle is definitely a good sales pitch.

For decades, the IRS, employer of 1,500 lawyers, failed to draw freshly scrubbed graduates from the country's top law schools. It recruited in the spring, instead of the preceding fall when the private firms did. "All the good ones were gone by then," Mr. Korb says. When it did find promising candidates, it left many of them in limbo for months; private firms usually respond within weeks. And then there's the pay: about $65,000 to $70,000, depending on location, for a first-year lawyer at the IRS. That's half the starting rate at private firms.

It's no wonder few of the smartest young minds in tax law considered starting their careers at the IRS. As a result, the IRS frequently finds itself out-manned and out-maneuvered by corporations or rich individuals, who hire pricey private lawyers to craft and defend sophisticated schemes to dodge taxes.

Mr. Korb -- J.D., Case Western Reserve University School of Law; LL.M., Georgetown University Law Center -- is out to change that. He says a few early years at the IRS is a big boost to a tax lawyer's career. His message seems to be sinking in. A wave of new graduates from law schools at Yale, New York University and the University of Southern California begin work next month, the first stream of new lawyers from those top-tier schools to join the IRS in years. In all, the IRS has 1,500 applicants so far for the 50 spots it wants to fill over the next 12 months.