21 October 2016
Criticizing the IRS is an American pastime. Most of us do it at least a little. Some of us do it a lot. How awesome would it be to get paid to criticize the IRS? To actually look at how the IRS does business and tell them how they are getting it wrong. There is someone who has this great gig, and her name is Nina Olson. She is the National Taxpayer Advocate. Not only does she get paid to provide feedback to the IRS on how they can improve service to taxpayers, but she has an army of 2,000 tax professionals to help her do it!
The Office of the Taxpayer Advocate, more commonly known as the Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS), was created in 1996. It is an independent office within the Internal Revenue Service with two Congressionally mandated functions. 1) Provide help to individual taxpayers in dealing with the IRS, and 2) Provide systemic help to the IRS to improve service to taxpayers.
If you are having significant issues in dealing with the IRS to resolve a tax problem, you may be able to get help from the Taxpayer Advocate Service. They have offices in all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico. If the TAS takes your case, you are assigned a specific representative who will personally work with you until a solution to your issue is found.
Just keep in mind the Taxpayer Advocate Service isn’t there to answer every tax question you might have. They are there to assist taxpayers who are experiencing abnormal difficulties. Cases the TAS will accept fall into four general categories:
1. Where a taxpayer is experiencing some financial difficulty, emergency, or hardship, and the IRS needs to move much faster than it usually does (or even can) under its normal procedures. In those cases, time is of the essence. If the IRS doesn't act quickly (for example, to remove a levy or release a lien), the taxpayer will experience even more financial harm.
2. Where many different IRS units and steps are involved, and the case needs a "coordinator" or "traffic cop" to make sure everyone does their part. TAS plays that role.
3. Where the taxpayer has tried to resolve a problem through normal IRS channels but those channels have broken down.
4. Where the taxpayer is presenting unique facts or issues (including legal issues), and the IRS is applying a "one size fits all" approach, isn’t listening to the taxpayer, or doesn’t recognize that it needs new guidance for those circumstances.
In their role of providing direct support to taxpayers the TAS is in a unique position to gather data on the most common issues causing taxpayer distress. These are the issues that may indicate a systemic problem in the IRS and the National Taxpayer Advocate is required to address these issues in an annual report to Congress.
In the 2015 Annual Report to Congress the National Taxpayer Advocate highlighted 24 serious problems at the IRS. Below are some of the comments Ms. Olson made about the IRS to Congress:
• TAXPAYER SERVICE: the IRS has developed a comprehensive “Future State” plan that aims to transform the way it interacts with taxpayers, but its plan may leave critical taxpayer needs and preferences unmet.
• IRS USER FEES: the IRS may adopt user fees to fill funding gaps without fully considering taxpayer burden and the impact on voluntary compliance.
• REVENUE PROTECTION: hundreds of thousands of taxpayers file legitimate tax returns that are incorrectly flagged and experience substantial delays in receiving their refunds because of an increasing rate of “false positives” within the IRS’s pre-refund wage verification program.
• PREPARER ACCESS TO ONLINE ACCOUNTS: granting un-credentialed preparers access to an online taxpayer account system could create security risks and harm taxpayers [Paul’s Note: Seems like a great reason to make sure you’re hiring an Enrolled Agent to prepare your taxes!]
• AFFORDABLE CARE ACT (ACA): the IRS is compromising taxpayer rights as it continues to administer the premium tax credit and individual shared responsibility payment provisions.
• IDENTITY THEFT (IDT): the IRS’s procedures for assisting victims of IDT, while improved, still impose excessive burden and delay refunds for too long.
Of course, not all systemic failures are the IRS’s fault. They don’t write the tax laws; they just implement them. Assisting thousands of taxpayers each year will sometimes uncover problems, discrepancies, or inconsistencies in the underlying tax law. So, in addition to telling the IRS how to get better, the National Taxpayer Advocate gets to tell Congress how they screwed up the tax law. The 2015 Annual Report to Congress contains 15 recommendations to Congress on how to fix the tax laws to protect taxpayer rights, reduce taxpayer burdens, minimize IRS waste, and improve the Whistleblower program to enhance compliance.
I think I would thoroughly enjoy a job where I got paid to tell Congress and the IRS how they are messing up. Especially when I am learning how they are messing up by helping individual taxpayers get their tax issues resolved - which is something I already enjoy doing.
If you think you might qualify for assistance from the Taxpayer Advocate Service, get in touch with them. It is your right as a taxpayer. Just remember that you need to exhaust all ordinary means of resolving your situation first (unless you are about to suffer grievous financial damage at the hands of the IRS – then you get head-of-the-line privileges).
If you are having an issue with the IRS (or a state taxing authority) you can give me a call and I will help you get it resolved. Don’t delay. The IRS starts a timer as soon as they send you that letter, so the sooner we get to work your problem, the better. In fact, being ahead of the IRS timelines can help to put us in an advantageous position with respect to getting a favorable outcome to your issue.
