By Ian Wilhlem

Washington

Last month’s appointment of the former head of the Internal Revenue Service, Mark W. Everson, to lead the American Red Cross raised eyebrows, but Mr. Everson says he is well prepared to help the disaster-relief group improve its tarnished image and manage its operations.

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AUDIO: Listen to an audio interview with Mr. Everson.

In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Everson, 52, says he is excited about the new role and considers it a natural step in his public-service career.

He is the third Red Cross chief executive in eight years. And while the position has become notoriously unstable — the two most recent leaders left while under fire for their responses to national crises — Mr. Everson says he is ready to handle the responsibilities.

“People said it’s a tough position, but running the Internal Revenue Service was a grown-up job,” he says. “I like a challenge and I think I can help the organization.”

Of course, the Red Cross may be easier to manage today. This year Congress changed the group’s federal charter, clarifying the authority of its chief executive and reducing the size of its board from 50 people to 20 or fewer by 2012. Such changes have helped resolve internal problems, Mr. Everson says, and made the job “attractive.”

He says the Red Cross, despite recent stumbles, remains vital to the nation and that the American public supports it wholeheartedly.

Mr. Everson, who is married with two children, says he became interested in nonprofit work during his time as IRS commissioner, where he pushed the revenue service’s Exempt Organizations Division to stamp out abuses by charities.

In addition, having previously lived in France and Turkey, he says he was drawn to the Red Cross because of the international scope of its work.

As the head of the Red Cross, Mr. Everson will earn $500,000, more than triple his annual salary with the IRS and roughly the same as Mr. Everson’s predecessor at the Red Cross, Marsha J. Evans, earned.

Mr. Everson says his top priorities for the Red Cross are improving the group’s blood storage and collection, which has been repeatedly fined by the Food and Drug Administration; increasing support for Iraq war veterans and military families, a service that he says has “atrophied” at the Red Cross; and making sure the charity is ready for a Katrina-like catastrophe.

While more work needs to be done to bolster its emergency operations, the organization is better prepared than it was two years ago for a big disaster, he says. It has placed medical equipment and other supplies in areas where a hurricane, earthquake, or other disaster is likely to hit and has clarified how it will coordinate with federal, state, and local governments.

For example, last month the Federal Emergency Management Agency took over the Red Cross’s role in coordinating the distribution of first aid, food, and shelter during disasters. Mr. Everson says such duties are better suited for a government agency and the shift won’t be a major change in how the Red Cross responses to emergencies.

“I’m comfortable with that evolution,” he says. “What we’re now doing won’t really be substantively different” than in the past. Yet preparing for the next crisis is hampered by financial realities.

The Red Cross is running an operating deficit — Mr. Everson declined to say how much the organization is in the red. While Americans gave the group more than $2.3-billion for Hurricane Katrina, helping swell its revenue for fiscal 2006 to a little more than $6-billion, the hurricane money cannot be used for general purposes, he explains.

To trim expenses he says he may lay off some of the 3,000 employees at the group’s national headquarters, in Washington. The choice of Mr. Everson has garnered praise with many government and nonprofit observers, who say he is an excellent manager and can help the venerable organization regain its stature.

But there is some criticism already for his tenure. Trent Stamp, president of Charity Navigator, a nonprofit watchdog in Mahwah, N.J., questioned his pick for Red Cross ombudsman — a new position created when Congress revised the group’s charter.

Mr. Everson appointed his former chief of staff at the IRS, Beverly Ortega Babers, to the job. Mr. Stamp wondered if she’d be able to effectively serve as internal critic with such close ties to its chief executive.

Mr. Everson brushed off such concerns. “Beverly has a strong independent voice,” he says. “If she tells me there’s a problem, I will know there’s a problem. She will have the absolute license to see what’s going on.”

Other critics have wondered if Mr. Everson is ill-suited to run the Red Cross because he lacks experience leading a nonprofit group; before working at the IRS, he held positions in the federal Office of Management and Budget and was the vice president of a food-services company in Dallas.

Mr. Everson responses that the IRS and the Red Cross are actually quite similar. Both organizations, he says, answer to Congress and everyday citizens, have national operations, and oversee a large number of people — 100,000 employees for the IRS and 35,000 employees and roughly 1 million volunteers for the entire Red Cross network nationwide.

Of course, there are some difference between running the nation’s tax collector and a humanitarian organization.

“My daughter said, ‘Now people will like you,’” he says with a smile.