IRS funding pleas don’t ‘pass the laugh test,’ Republican says

A senior House Republican made clear on Wednesday that the IRS’s push for more funding isn’t gaining traction on Capitol Hill.

“The argument that the IRS lacks the resources to operate efficiently doesn’t pass the laugh test given the misguided judgment demonstrated by an organization that has lost the confidence of the American people,” Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) said in a statement.

{mosads}John Koskinen, the IRS commissioner, has been making the case for weeks that years of budget cuts have taken a toll on the service’s ability to help taxpayers and enforce the tax code, a point he reiterated at the Brookings Institution on Wednesday.

Congress has cut the agency’s budget by more than $1 billion — from $12.1 billion to $10.9 billion — over the last five years, a process that started before the controversy surrounding the IRS’s improper scrutiny of Tea Party groups.

Now, the IRS isn’t answering more than six out of every 10 calls from taxpayers, with just days left before the April 15 tax filing deadline. That situation has frustrated both taxpayers seeking help and IRS staffers, according to recent news reports.

But Roskam, the chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee that oversees the IRS, said the agency was still wasting plenty of money that could be used to help taxpayers.

“The IRS claims call center wait times have skyrocketed due to recent budget cuts, but it still spends roughly 500,000 hours annually on employee union activities — time that could be used to answer an additional 2.3 million taxpayer calls per year,” Roskam said.

“Rather than improve customer service with commonsense reforms, the IRS is doing its best to hide its poor judgment under a cloak of excuses.”

Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla.), the chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that has jurisdiction over the IRS budget, has added that Republicans were cutting the agency’s budget to ensure it didn’t spend frivolously, in the wake of the Tea Party controversy and reports about excessive spending on conferences and videos.

Koskinen has said that the agency has put those previous issues behind it, and that the budget cuts will impede the IRS’s effort to update obsolete technology systems and to hire younger employees.

At the Brookings event, Nina Olson, the national taxpayer advocate, maintained that the budget cuts had hampered the IRS’s customer service capabilities. She added that the reduction in the number of phone calls the agency was answering directly hurt the public’s ability to challenge the IRS about their bill or tax issues in general.

Koskinen said that further budget cuts could make his agency even more dysfunctional, with taxpayers losing even more faith in the tax system.

“My concern is at some point the voluntary tax compliance system begins to erode,” Koskinen said. “That’s not an on-off switch.”