The IRS Is Swamped – But There’s A Silver Lining

There's good news and bad news coming out of the IRS in recent weeks.

On the upside: the agency is answering its phones again, and (hopefully) providing taxpayers with the right answers to their questions. On the downside, answering the phones more promptly has caused the paper jam at the agency to grow again, delaying action on millions of paper tax returns.

According to National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins:

…the IRS is currently juggling 3.7 million amended returns, 6.8 million “in suspense” with missing information and 5.3 million pieces of correspondence. “Those are pretty big numbers that the IRS is still dealing with,” she said.

This season, the agency has prioritized phone service and answered more than 85% of calls from key phone lines in less than five minutes.

“But it did come at a cost,” Collins said, because phone assistors process paper returns during downtime from answering calls. “The problem is, we are now back to a backlog of paper correspondence and amended returns, similar to where we were a year ago,” she said.

Collins also said the IRS can't go into the next tax season with so many returns still awaiting action. Fair enough. The Biden administration proposed to use a portion of the 10-year $80 billion increase in IRS funding to help clear the backlogs and answer the phones.

But half of that proposed increase was slated for enforcement. Not customer service. Not processing returns. The debt ceiling agreement clawed back roughly $21 billion of that $80 billion spending increase. And some in the GOP say they will go after the remaining amount, too.

Well, bully for them. But here's the thing: do these worthies have a plan for ensuring the IRS can clear up the backlog of returns, ensure taxpayer and tax preparer questions are answered in a timely, and correct manner, and still provide enough resources to hire, train, and retain competent staff?

We shall see.

It's one thing to rail on the tax collectors. It's quite another to make sure they have the resources to do the job Congress has entrusted them to do. And as the votes for fundamental tax reform – a flat tax or national sales tax, for example – just aren't there, then it is essential for Congress to ensure the IRS can do its job. As politically inconvenient, personally unpalatable, and philosophically difficult as that may be.

But let's give Congress something much easier, and well within its power to do: put the existing statement of taxpayers' rights front and center in the IRS code. The Taxpayer Advocate's office says that while such a move would be “partly symbolic,” it “…would send an important message to U.S. taxpayers and IRS employees alike that Congress expects IRS employees to respect taxpayer rights and considers them foundational for effective tax administration.”

It is symbolic. But symbols are important in official Washington, and putting the list of taxpayers' rights at the beginning of the code, rather than buried somewhere inside it, can be done tomorrow.  An easy win, an even better message to send to everyone inside and outside the IRS.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

READ NEXT: