IRS Train Wreck

Chris EdwardsAmericans don ’t expect to get great service from government agencies, but the current performance of the Internal Revenue Service is a train wreck. The pandemic slowed IRS operations and exacerbated the agency ’s existing deficiencies. At the same time, Congress has been loading up the tax code with new and expanded benefits and tasking the IRS with handing out hundreds of millions of aid checks.The IRS Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS) recentlydocumented the operational mess at the IRS:IRS telephone service is “the worst it has ever been,” with the IRS answering just 11 percent of incoming calls in FY 2021. [p. 3]The IRS mails tens of millions of notices each year, often requiring responses. It used to take the IRS about 45 days to turn around correspondence, but now the “processing time for some categories of correspondence has been running six months or longer.” [p. 3]The number of disputes the TAS handles between taxpayers and the IRS soared from 167,000 in 2017 to 264,000 in 2021. [p. 4]Mountains of unopened mail have piled up at IRS facilities leaving millions of taxpayers in financial limbo. The IRS ended the 2021 season with a backlog of more than 35 million returns, and today “millions of returns and amended returns still remain unprocessed.” [p. 20]Last year, “tens of millions of taxpayers were forced to wait extraordinarily long periods of time for the IRS to process their tax returns, issue their refunds, and ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs