The IRS’s in-house watchdog said Wednesday that the tax agency needs to rethink its priorities and stop emphasizing audits and enforcement over helping taxpayers.
Nina Olson, the nation’s taxpayer advocate, made that recommendation after what all sides said was a difficult 2015 tax filing season. Faced with another round of budget cuts and new programs to implement, the agency answered far fewer telephone calls from taxpayers this year.
{mosads}”The IRS continues to view itself as an enforcement agency first and a service agency second,” Olson said in a mandated annual report to Congress.
The taxpayer advocate, who has long called on Congress to stop cutting the IRS’s budget, said she had no doubt that funding issues were hurting the agency – and that the 2015 filing season was a success, all things considered. The IRS implemented both ObamaCare and a major law cracking down on tax evasion in 2015, even as its budget was more than $1 billion lower than it was five years ago.
But Olson said that by not putting more of its limited resources into helping taxpayers, the IRS threatened to undermine the voluntary nature of the U.S. tax system. The IRS answered only around 2 in 5 calls this past filing season, a sharp decline from past years — and those who got through had to wait almost 25 minutes on average.
“In my view, it should transform itself as a tax agency from one that is designed around nabbing the small percentage of the population that actively evades tax to one that aims first and foremost to meet the needs of the overwhelming majority of taxpayers who are trying to comply with the tax laws,” Olson wrote. “By shifting its focus, the IRS would not give up one whit of its power or any of its tools for fighting tax evasion.”
Congressional Republicans have made it clear that there’s no end in sight to the battles over the IRS’s funding. The House GOP proposed yet another cut to the IRS’s budget for next year, and Republicans lawmakers have insisted that the agency’s own poor funding choices are the real reason for the decline in taxpayer services.