Warren urges IRS to add ‘taxpayer advocate’ to team implementing agency reforms

Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) are urging the IRS to include a representative from the agency’s in-house watchdog on its core team focused on implementing a bipartisan IRS modernization law.

“The clearest route to bring the voice of taxpayers into the implementation of the Taxpayer First Act … is to ensure that the Taxpayer Advocate Service is substantively involved in the implementation process,” the senators wrote in a letter this week to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig.

The Taxpayer First Act, which President Trump signed last year, includes a host of provisions designed to make targeted improvements to the IRS in areas such as customer service, information technology and identity-theft protection. Many of the provisions in the law are based on recommendations made by the National Taxpayer Advocate — who leads an independent office within the IRS called the Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS) that works to help taxpayers with problems.

In a report issued earlier this year, acting National Taxpayer Advocate Bridget Roberts said that TAS does not have a representative in the core team formed to oversee the efforts to implement the law, calling that exclusion “deeply concerning.” Roberts said that TAS would still work to offer its recommendations about implementation to the extent it can do so.

Warren and Markey echoed Roberts’s comments about the need for TAS to have a representative on the implementation team. 

“The exclusion of TAS from the core Taxpayer First Act implementation team deprives the office of crucial expertise and denies taxpayers their institutional voice in charting implementation of legislation TAS helped craft,” the senators wrote.

The senators urged Rettig to add a representative from TAS to the implementation team “immediately” and to provide them with a list of all the current members of the team.

This isn’t the first letter that Warren, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, has sent to the IRS in recent weeks regarding implementation of the Taxpayer First Act. Last month, Warren and several other Democratic lawmakers pressed the IRS about its plans for implementing a provision in the law that excludes low-income taxpayers from the agency’s private debt collection program.