IRC § 7803(c)(2)(B)(ii)(III) requires the National Taxpayer Advocate to prepare an Annual Report to Congress that contains a summary of the ten most serious problems encountered by taxpayers each year. For 2020, the National Taxpayer Advocate has identified, analyzed, and offered recommendations to assist the IRS and Congress in resolving ten such problems.
Since FY 2010, the IRS workforce has shrunk by approximately 20 percent, about even with the inflation-adjusted reduction in the IRS budget. Inadequate funding combined with weaknesses in hiring and retention strategies have created an insufficient and disproportionately aging workforce, with an estimated 26 percent of IRS employees eligible to retire during FY 2021. The report says insufficient experienced staffing in the IRS’s Human Capital Office and hiring restrictions outside its control have left the IRS ill-equipped to handle the agency’s hiring needs. TAS recommends the IRS hire additional human resource specialists to meet hiring needs, restructure internal hiring processes to reduce cycle times, and renegotiate the hiring process with the National Treasury Employees Union to allow for up to 50 percent of all hiring announcements to be filled externally.
In FY 2020, the IRS received more than 100 million calls on its toll-free telephone lines. IRS employees answered only about 24 million. Taxpayers who got through waited an average of 18 minutes on hold. In recent years, the IRS has been serving fewer taxpayers in its Taxpayer Assistance Centers (TACs), and the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated that trend. The number of taxpayers the IRS has served face-to-face has declined from 4.4 million five years ago in FY 2016, to 2.3 million in FY 2019, to 1.0 million in FY 2020. To improve telephone and TAC services, TAS recommends that the IRS prioritize the expansion of “customer callback” technology and give taxpayers the option of receiving face-to-face service through videoconferencing.
The report says online taxpayer accounts are plagued by limited functionality. For example, taxpayers generally cannot view images of past tax returns, most IRS notices, or proposed assessments; file documents; or update their addresses or the names of authorized representatives. The inability to conduct transactions online is frustrating for taxpayers who have been conducting comparable transactions with financial institutions for more than two decades and increases the number of telephone calls and pieces of correspondence the IRS receives. TAS recommends the IRS expedite the expansion of online taxpayer accounts.
The IRS addressed many COVID-19 related service shortcomings by developing temporary workaround procedures, such as authorizing employees to accept and transmit documents related to the determination or collection of a tax liability by email through 2020 and expanding the list of forms on which it will temporarily accept electronic signatures. To provide excellent taxpayer service and plan for any future emergencies, the IRS must build upon such temporary initiatives and make permanent improvements in the IRS’s digital service offerings. Taxpayers need the option to correspond with the IRS digitally, including attaching and transmitting documents in a secure manner.
The IRS’s antiquated information technology systems and infrastructure present significant obstacles to expanding electronic filing (e-filing) and digitizing paper returns. Automated processing of an e-filed form eliminates the need for the costly manual transcription of millions of lines of data, and the increased accuracy of the data imported reduces the need to resolve transcription errors. While most taxpayers prefer e-filing when it is available, some prefer to file paper returns or must file on paper because they do not have access to a computer or broadband internet. Therefore, even as the IRS expands its e-filing options, it must maintain options that allow taxpayers to choose their preferred method of filing. It must also improve the processing of paper returns by expanding existing technology and implementing new technology to reduce processing delays. These actions reduce burden to taxpayers and the IRS and produce long-term cost savings.
The IRS continues to operate the two oldest major IT systems still in use in the federal government, dating to the early 1960s. The IRS also operates about 60 case management systems that generally are not interoperable. The report says obsolete systems limit the functionality of taxpayer accounts, prevent taxpayers from obtaining full details about the status of their cases, and impede the IRS’s ability to select the best cases for compliance actions.
The IRS correspondence audit program, as designed, leaves taxpayers solely dependent on toll-free phone services that operate with limited availability or receiving IRS notifications issued with uncertain timeframes. The inability to reach a single point of contact diminishes the customer experience, creates IRS inefficiency, hinders opportunities to engage and educate our nation’s taxpayers and decreases potential for developing and building trust with the IRS.
The IRS’s treatment of IRC §§ 6038 and 6038A foreign information reporting penalties as systemically assessable is legally unsupportable, administratively problematic, and imposes costs, delays, and stress for taxpayers. Because the penalties are immediately assessed, taxpayers’ only recourse is to rely on IRS discretion and request a reasonable cause abatement of the penalties or pay them and seek a refund in federal court. This approach is particularly unsuited to these penalties, as demonstrated by abatement rates in excess of 55 percent when measured by number of penalties and 71 percent when measured by dollar value. Thus, both taxpayers and the IRS are expending significant time, energy, and money addressing penalties that ideally should not be assessed in the first instance.
The IRS’s published expected processing time for amended returns is 16 weeks. However, the IRS fails to advise taxpayers that if their amended returns are audited, processing will take significantly longer. One of the steps in the process, assigning an amended return that has been selected for audit to an examiner (who contacts the taxpayer) and opening the audit, alone took an estimated median of three to nine weeks for individual amended returns, and 14 to 16 weeks for corporate amended returns. Moreover, when taxpayers file an amended return to request a reduction in an assessed tax that remains unpaid, i.e., a request for abatement, the IRS sometimes refuses to consider the claim and issues a form letter rejecting the claim without an adequate explanation to the taxpayer. Although the IRS has the authority to consider these claims, the form letter simply states the law does not allow a claim to reduce tax owed and instructs the taxpayer to pay the tax followed by another amended return.
The IRS issues most refunds promptly, but its pre-refund fraud filters delay millions of legitimate refund claims. In 2020, these filters flagged about 1.9 million returns for identity verification and 3.3 million to verify income and withholding. But the IRS ultimately issued most refunds requested on returns it flagged in calendar year 2019. Taxpayers whose refunds were delayed had trouble getting specific and timely information about the status their refunds.
