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Official watchdog proves that IRS treats taxpayers like dirt

by Quin Hillyer, Commentary Writer | | January 12, 2022 02:41 PM
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The IRS needs more agents on its help desk, not its audit department.

That’s the obvious takeaway from the annual report to Congress of the
National Taxpayer Advocate, a congressionally created independent
organization within the IRS. In the report released Tuesday, Advocate
leader Erin Collins said the IRS is in “crisis.”

“From the perspective of tens of millions of taxpayers, [the year 2021]
was horrendous," Collins said.

Among the problems: “Processing Backlogs Led to Long Refund Delays.”
“Telephone Service Was the Worst It Has Ever Been.” “The IRS Took Months
to Process Taxpayer Responses to Its Notices, Further Delaying Refunds
and in Some Cases Leading to Premature Collection Notices.”

On the phone service, agents only took 11.4% of calls made to its help
line, and the average wait for those it did take had an inordinate
average hold time of 23 minutes.

The Advocate was quick to say the blame doesn’t necessarily lie on IRS
workers themselves, who the report argues are overburdened and
underfunded. It’s a reasonable assessment (although plenty of taxpayers
can tell true stories of IRS agents who are uncaring or incompetent).
Congress has created an extraordinarily complicated tax code and then
keeps changing it year after year while using the IRS as a back-door
conduit for supposedly “emergency” relief efforts.

Advocates of super-simplified tax systems, such as a flat tax or a form
of national sales tax, can take plenty of fodder from the logical
implications of this report. Still, tax reform wasn’t the Advocate’s
point or purview. The report is focused on management and resources. The
report makes clear that even if Congress doesn’t reform the tax system,
it should reform the tax agency that implements that system.

Unfortunately, national Democrats want to go in exactly the wrong
direction. President Joe Biden’s big-spending Build Back Better bill
would provide $79 billion more (during 10 years) for the IRS. However,
the extra money would be used not to serve taxpayers better but to
harass them more. It would all go to expanded tax enforcement and
audits. This would be unconscionable. Under this proposal, the same IRS
that won’t answer its own phone — and when it does, it gives wrong
answers as much as a third of the time — would put millions and millions
more taxpayers through the wringer in a system where the odds are
stacked entirely in favor of the bureaucrats, right or wrong.

Anyone who has dealt with a dispute or complicated question with the IRS
knows the system is opaque. The actual decision-makers often are not
just unavailable for discussion but also utterly anonymous. And the time
and expense of challenging even horribly erroneous IRS administrative
decisions are prohibitive. Even after all that, access to real courts of
law is limited and well beyond the budget of most taxpayers. The whole
system is rotten.

In addition to tax reform that radically simplifies the system, two
things are needed. First, the IRS should be subject to top-to-bottom
administrative reform, perhaps as part of a whole-of-government reform
of the Administrative Procedure Act and civil service laws. The goal
should be to incentivize IRS personnel to help compliance and solve
problems, not treat taxpayers as suspects and adversaries. Second, yes,
the IRS could use more resources. But almost all of those new resources
should go to taxpayer assistance, not punishment and not
“investigations” carrying a prosecutorial mien.

The Advocate’s report amounts to a cry for help for taxpayers. Biden’s
proposal is instead a threat of persecution. Every member of Congress
should reject Biden’s approach.

Opinion Beltway Confidential IRS Taxpayers Tax Reform