Every year, the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent agency within the Internal Revenue Service, issues a report to Congress on the 20 most serious problems taxpayers face in trying to fulfill their patriotic duty to fund their nation.
Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson, who just this year announced her retirement from the agency, notes that identifying the 20 problems that are most serious is not objectively possible or even desirable. Sometimes, for example, the problems are the same as those of previous years, so the legislated mandate allows for subjective decisions about what to include. READ MORE →
“All it takes is money.” Sounds easy? Except for the politics.
By CPA Trendlines
Wow! We asked for it, and we got it: an avalanche of advice on how to fix the IRS.
CPA Trendlines has always received smart, candid, and often outspoken responses to our Busy Season survey— thousands of tax preparers from sea to shining sea telling us what’s happening in their offices.
But this year, halfway through the season, we asked a loaded question: How would you fix the IRS? The professionals in the trenches of tax prep know what the problems are and what to do about them. They also seemed a bit miffed (to put it mildly) that the solutions seem so obvious, yet the problems keep compounding. READ MORE →
The annual report to Congress, mandated by law, presents a lurid indictment of an essential government agency that “is stretched to its breaking point.” READ MORE →
National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson has slammed Congress hard in the Taxpayer Advocate Service Annual Report 2017. After a series of IRS budget cuts over the last several years, Olson says she sees the daily consequences of reduced funding and the choices made by the agency in the face of funding constraints.
“Funding cuts have rendered the IRS unable to provide acceptable levels of taxpayer service, unable to upgrade its technology…and unable to maintain compliance programs that both promote and protect taxpayer rights,” Olson said in her preface to the annual report. “‘Shortcuts’ have become the norm, and ‘shortcuts’ are incompatible with high-quality tax administration.”
America’s tax practitioners are in a swirl of fear, hope, and frustration as they recover from the IRS shutdown, present their clients with the realities of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, and scramble to deal with new regulations, unobtainable IRS forms, obsolete software, and inevitable filing extensions.
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“Shortcuts’ have become the norm.”