Shulman co-founded and served as executive vice president of FoundryOne, Inc., a company focused on building and spinning off technology-focused startups within major corporations.

Previously, Shulman was vice president of Darby Overseas Investments, Ltd. and served as a senior policy advisor and as chief of staff for the National Commission on Restructuring the Internal Revenue Service.

He played a key role in the merger between New York Stock Exchange regulatory operations and NASD, which created FINRA.

He was the lead executive in negotiating corporate bond transparency with the financial services industry, and hired the team that launched the product.

He also led NASD into new business segments, and helped it to re-vamp its surveillance technology in order to win contracts to regulate other exchanges besides NASDAQ.

[9][10][11] Shortly after President Obama was re-elected in the 2012 presidential election, on November 11, 2012, Shulman finished serving out his full term as commissioner.

[12][13] In March and April 2008, one of his first duties was to send out 77 million tax rebates after congress passed the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008.

[15] As part of the stimulus package, also referred to as the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, about one third of the $787 billion was administered through the tax system.

[20] While serving as commissioner, Shulman led a major modernization of the IRS's technology to streamline tax payment processing, facilitate compliance, and improve customer service.

The result was the customer service representatives could have access to accurate data and there was real time information to combat non-compliance, including refund fraud.

In addition to modernizing IRS's core technology, Shulman also significantly increased electronic filing of tax returns when he was commissioner.

Shulman said the IRS will allow the amount of the theft loss to include the investor's unrecoverable investment for Ponzi scheme victims.

Victims who are part of small businesses will be able to go back 5 years to recover investments and so-called "phantom profits".

[25][26][27] Douglas Shulman was the commissioner of the IRS during some of the time when new criteria, including the name of organizations, were used to identify tax exempt applications for review.