Federal offices will be closed January 9 for national day of mourning
An official website of the U.S. Govt An official website of the U.S. GovtThe Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS) is an independent organization within the IRS. Led by the National Taxpayer Advocate, TAS is your Voice at the IRS.
The National Taxpayer Advocate’s Annual Report to Congress identifies taxpayers’ problems and provides suggestions to further protect taxpayer rights and ease taxpayer burden.
The National Taxpayer Advocate delivers this report directly to the tax-writing committees in Congress (the House Committee on Ways and Means and the Senate Committee on Finance), with no prior review by the IRS Commissioner, the Secretary of the Treasury, or the Office of Management and Budget.
The National Taxpayer Advocate’s Preface describes many of the challenges taxpayers faced this year and offers a Taxpayer Rights and Service Assessment measuring how the agency is doing in protecting and furthering taxpayer rights and service while driving voluntary compliance.
The IRS has made considerable progress over the last two years in improving the taxpayer experience. Although Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funding was heavily tilted toward enforcement and allocated only four percent of IRS funding to the Taxpayer Services account and only six percent of IRS funding to the Business Systems Modernization technology account, the IRS has developed ambitious but achievable taxpayer service and technology goals that it has been working diligently to accomplish.
But continued funding is critical to enable the IRS to successfully deliver on its mission and transform how it works with taxpayers going forward. Over the past two decades, IRS funding has yo-yoed up and down, preventing the agency from developing realistic long-term plans because it could not be certain funding would remain available for implementation. That is why the multiyear funding provided by the IRA has been a game-changer for taxpayers. Though the Enforcement funding in the IRA has been controversial, Taxpayer Services funding and technology funding have received bipartisan support, as they should, and they require continued support to provide taxpayers with better service and a better overall experience.
The National Taxpayer Advocate and her TAS team stand ready to help improve taxpayer service and tax administration for the benefit of all taxpayers and to continue to serve as their safety net when the system fails, all while working to protect taxpayer rights and minimize taxpayer burden.
Each year’s Annual Report to Congress identifies the ten most serious problems facing taxpayers and offers recommendations to fix them. These issues can affect taxpayers’ basic rights and the ways they pay taxes or receive refunds, even if they are not involved in a dispute with the IRS. As your Voice at the IRS, the National Taxpayer Advocate uses the Annual Report to elevate these problems and recommend solutions to Congress and the highest levels of the IRS.
This section discusses the ten most frequently litigated federal tax issues from the preceding year. To provide a broader view of issues brought to the court by taxpayers, it contains an analysis of cases petitioned in the Tax Court as well as decided cases.
In this section, TAS reports on its 2024 advocacy updates and highlights from its Case Advocacy and Systemic Advocacy functions.
For the National Taxpayer Advocate, thorough research and analysis of current tax issues and trends is a vital part of the Annual Report. TAS research projects yield accurate, insightful data that inform her advocacy for taxpayers and strengthen her authority and arguments before the IRS and Congress.
The 2025 Purple Book presents a concise summary of 69 legislative recommendations that the National Taxpayer Advocate believes will strengthen taxpayer rights and improve tax administration. Most of the recommendations have been made in detail in prior reports, but others are presented in this book for the first time. The National Taxpayer Advocate believes that most of the recommendations presented in this volume are non-controversial, common-sense reforms that the tax-writing committees, other committees, and other members of Congress may find useful.
