On Hold with the IRS. On the Hook with Clients.
A shrinking workforce leaves tax professionals spending more time pursuing answers and explaining delays.
By CPA Trendlines
Despite the IRS’s insistence it’s processing 98% of the returns it receives, practitioners are reporting two-hour phone waits, authorizations that take weeks to post and client problems that remain unresolved after they finally reach an employee.
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The problem, apparently, is the difference between routine e-filed processing and what happens when a case needs an actual human.
New oversight reports and practitioner complaints show an agency that moves enormous volumes of returns while struggling to clear exceptions.
For accounting firms, those exceptions mean repeated calls, delayed access to records and more time explaining why a filed return has not produced a finished case.
Across every major metric, CPA Trendlines is finding the same pattern: Firms are doing more work and generating more revenue — but keeping less of it.
