On April 19, the day after the end of the 2016 tax filing season (for most people), the House of Representatives considered House Resolution 673, expressing the will of Congress that the IRS should provide free copies of its Publication 17, the basic taxpayer’s guide to paying taxes.
In the past, the publication had been printed and distributed to libraries, post offices, IRS service offices and by mail on request. But in 2015 the IRS stopped printing the document “as it transitions to a fully electronic tax filing system, including an electronic system for providing instructions on filing tax returns,” the resolution says.
That such a resolution is needed is a sad commentary on the state of our nation’s tax-collection agency, which seems to be adopting the attitude that “if it’s online, that’s all that’s necessary.” The results of such an attitude are predictable. Taxpayer services have gone to hell.
For the 2016 filing season, the IRS spent $178.4 million to improve is performance in providing telephone service to taxpayers. It managed to raise its rate of simply answering phone calls to a dismal 67 percent, which would be at best a D on most grading scales. After filing season the agency expects to answer only 47 percent of calls for the rest of the year. That’s a solid F anywhere.
The taxpayer guide is not the only IRS publication becoming scarce. IRS officials told agents in local assistance centers that only a certain number of forms would be printed at the beginning of the filing season and when those were gone they would not be replaced. So that taxpayers would not be upset when seeing the empty racks, the IRS simply removed the racks.
I do not object to paying taxes, but I have high expectations for the services I receive in return. The nature and extent of those services are subject to debate, but IRS assistance when paying taxes is one of them. National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson, said as much in recent testimony before a House subcommittee, saying the agency’s guiding principle should be meeting the needs “of the vast majority of taxpayers who are willing to comply with tax laws.”
Unfortunately, the guiding principle of the IRS now is “put it online.”
In March, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told the Senate Finance Committee that going online is an imperative and that “when it costs between $40 and $60 to interact with a taxpayer in person, and less than $1 to interact online, we must reexamine how we provide the best possible taxpayer experience.”
That makes perfect business sense. But the IRS is not a business. It has an obligation to serve taxpayers and must acknowledge that the Internet is not now—and probably never will be—the answer to everything. There are millions of taxpayers who do not have or who do not choose to use Internet service in dealing with their taxes. These people are not second class citizens and do not deserve second class service.
In her testimony, Olson supported the IRS commitment to developing cost-effective online services, but added that “the IRS is significantly underestimating continuing taxpayer demand for telephone and face-to-face service, and it must be required to maintain those services to meet taxpayer needs.”
According to Olson, IRS is not only significantly underestimating this demand, it is deliberately underestimating it by discouraging taxpayers. “Making a service more difficult to use, then touting declining use of that service as a reason to cut the service further or entirely, is disingenuous,” she said. It is more than disingenuous; it is dishonest.
The IRS does not carry all of the blame. As usual, Congress is responsible for many of the problems. Budget and oversight responsibilities reside with the legislators, and they have failed to adequately fulfill them. It is Congress’s job to see that the IRS budget and its plans for using that budget meet the needs not only of the agency, but of the taxpayers it should be serving.
Congress must ensure that the IRS meets our needs not only in cyberspace but in the Real World.