Said Roger Harris, president an accounting firm, quoted in "Three days after the 2022 tax season started, an overwhelmed IRS suspends some taxpayer notices/The agency is trying to cut down on correspondence with taxpayers, to avoid adding to a backlog of returns" (WaPo).
Perhaps finally the IRS realized the absurdity of the request for more paperwork. “In many situations, the tax return may be part of our current paper tax inventory and simply hasn’t been processed” the agency statement said...
Which ones will keep going out automatically? The IRS didn’t say....
“There is a sense of despair right now,” said Melanie Lauridsen, senior manager for tax policy and advocacy with the AICPA. “People are getting these notices and they can’t even get in touch with the IRS....”
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30 comments:
Government run anything....sucks. They would all be fired if they were in the private sector.
The IRS has a special hotline for certified CPAs so they can quickly access agents. My CPA says typical wait time on hold is 45 minutes.
Funny, there are plenty of IRS agents available to monitor all your $600 expenditures for Brandon.
It is a nightmare for everyone including the professionals. You know you’re in the right but can’t anyone at IR to respond. You have to be persistent and that’s part if the problem. Joe Public wants to clear things up with one phone call, then put IR on ignore. That’s bad. Write letters, return receipt. Keep responding. Write some more. Eventually you stumble upon someone at IR who can help…
If it’s any consolation there’s Governor of a semi-famous leftie state who has IR a-hounding for tax that’s been paid but IR saying you are a deadbeat. That could be a problem come election time…
The IRS has a special hotline for certified CPAs so they can quickly access agents. My CPA says typical wait time on hold is 45 minutes
Never heard of this hotline. There are taxpayer advocates for each state and sometimes a ‘911’ number assigned to a client case. Also, the big accounting firms often hire former IRS people who use their contacts to the benefit of the firm…
Yeah. I get a notice about an old debt I will eventually get around to paying. But the anxiety for me is I pay as I go, for the ride share thing I do, and my biggest fear is they'll apply may payments for what I owe now to what I owe then, when I was taking money out of a 401k.
There's only my sister, who does my taxes, assuring me they won't.
What if they do?
There's nobody to talk to at the IRS.
This matters less than most people might think as the IRS does not allow taxpayers to rely on tax advice from the agents who work the IRS help lines.
They pay a pretty good interest rate on refunds they don't get to for a long time, so their slowness can pay off.
This could all be solved with a flat tax.
As it's tax season I'll simply say that I love the IRS and hope that all of their agents are doing well and having a good year. The very best to all of them.
I'll have more to say in May.
Fire them all. They deliberately tanked the Tea Party groups applications to help Obama.
The problem for the Regime trying to use the IRS as enforcers is that the people that work for the IRS are not industrious by nature.
The State can try to punish and it will have a corrosive effect.
But the IRS lackeys would rather be watching porn during work.
I have to share an experience I just had with the PA Department of Revenue.
I got a letter around November 15, 2021. It said I owed $398. So I look for details and they are sparse on the letter. But it basically says I owe $0 in taxes and $398 in accumulated penalties and interest. So I call their 800 number.
I spend 2 hours on the phone, on hold, on some of the worst hold music of my life. I don't get anyone. This was during business hours.
I go on their website and it says the ONLY way to get additional information or file appeals is through their website. All communication must be in writing through their portal. Ok, no ideal, but kinda understandable.
I create an account. But in order to complete creating an account they have to mail me an ID. That takes 2 weeks to receive.
I receive the ID, I use it to log-in, at which time I'm asked to double factor authenticate. After I do that, it requires me to further confirm my ID by entering a former PA tax return total.
After completing this exhaustive ID process, I get into the website.
There is no place to communicate or appeal. The website is purely to request extractable forms.
I request a detailed statement of my balance. It provides no additional information.
So at this point I've spent 2 hours on the phone, waited for two weeks for an ID, spent an hour logging in, navigated their website, and found myself at a complete dead end. There is no next step.
So I paid the $398.
I see little difference between my experience and blackmail.
you pay them more. you get less,
"they can't get that help."
The federal government can't manage its most basic task well. And yet Dems want it to control more of society with more complicated rules and larger bureaucracies.
IRS owes me $272 for a revised 2019 return. It acknowledges on the net that it received it 5/25, then says it will take four months to process.......still waiting 8 months later. Phone calls get a message that they can't take calls today, try tomorrow....each and every time.
Several years ago before COVID, Wisconsin Revenue gave me notice that a deduction I claimed wasn't valid and requested $7000. My CPA agreed but said the amount should be $2500 so filed an appeal. The State Responded that it owed ME $26000!!!! My CPA looked into it and found the agent had added when she should have subtracted. I ended up paying $1500 even tho my CPA said it should be more.
IRS has never been fast. Twice they've sent me notices that I owed more (it does kinda ruin your day) and it took awhile to straighten it out (they were wrong in both cases), but sounds like they've really run off the rails in the last year or so. What the hell is happening?
I made a mistake on our 2019 taxes - they sent us the (erroneous) refund I had computed, didn't notify us until August of 2021 that there was a problem, at which point we now owed them interest. Tax forms were submitted electronically - the mistake was such that the computer would have been able to immediately identify that there was a potential problem. THat could have then resulted in an immediate, automated letter informing us that there was a possible problem. Typical, horribly inefficient government system. So let the government take care of our health care!
Blogger rhhardin said...
They pay a pretty good interest rate on refunds they don't get to for a long time, so their slowness can pay off.
It that the reason that I have been waiting 37 weeks (and counting) for a refund from an amended tax return? That is giving them too much credit. I believe incompetence is the most likely reason. I got my refund from Maryland for the amended return in 15 weeks. Also, when you call the special IRS phone line for amended return refunds, after providing the automated response with the information requested, you are told that the wait time is too long, please call back the next day. How is that for service!
So, they had a program that allowed you to see what you owed, what you had paid, etc. Except that it wasn’t maybe secure enough. Imagine identity thieves getting that information. So, a couple weeks ago, they announced a new program, with a third party (ID.me) that will provide enhanced security. Part of that will be through increased verification. You send in a photo of your DL (the one that blacks don’t have, which is why requiring one to vote disenfranchises them) and a photo of yourself. They then do a credit check to verify every thing. Bells were starting to ring in my head. How private is all this information? This third party company promises to keep it really secure, but reserves the right to share it with select partners. What? Is the IRS included in those select customers? It may be their biggest one. Who else is? In order to continue to get access to the basic information that the IRS has on your account, you are now going to give up a photo, a government photo ID, and your entire credit history. This company doesn’t tell you who it’s select partners are, beyond the assumed IRS - does it include Amazon? Nigerian princes with fortunes burning holes in their pockets that they want to share?
This third party company (ID.me) is already providing access to other government agencies’ records - including the USPTO. apparently. The scuttlebutt is that your USPTO ID.me ID works with the IRS. Nice, I guess, unless doing so gives the IRS access to your client list. Just another reason that I am glad that I am retired.
Some here might ask why am I paranoid about the IRS having all this information about me. After all they are legally bound to protect my confidential information, etc. My response is a name: Lois Lerner. She and her non profit unit threw a big monkey wrench into the Tea Party movement by arbitrarily denying local Tea Party organizations tax exempt status. What must be remembered is that IRS employees are unionized, in probably the most radically leftest federal employee union: the treasury department union. Did Lerner go to jail for that? That’s silly. Of course not. Was she reprimanded? Nope. Allowed full retirement. No one was seriously reprimanded. Then, to add insult to injury, the FBI asked the IRS for the tax records of the Trump campaign for their Clinton caused RussiaGate investigation, and they apparently provided them on a stack of DVDs. They probably rushed to provide Adam Schifty with IRS records for their bogus J-6 investigation. Just now, they are probably going to include biometrics and credit information, thanks to their ID.me partnership.
Think of this as LawFare with the IRS. The IRS cannot legally solicit this information directly. But apparently, it’s just fine for them to have it if they just stumble upon it, and requiring you to use ID.me to access their information in your account, and ID.me gathers that information to prove your identity, and passes it onto its partners, the biggest probably being the IRS, just coincidentally provides the IRS directly with personal information that they can’t ask for directly. Yes. LawFare, which is why I expect that this has the blessing, if not contrivance, of the FJB Administration.
I got a notice from the IRS last year. It looked like it was generated by a Fortran program running on an IBM 360 and printed on one of those printers that requires sprocket holes on each side of the paper. It used Courier font.
I got an IRS notice a year or so ago about failing to report some income a couple of tax returns back. I did mistakenly forget to report the income and so immediately paid the taxes they said I owed. Since then I've gotten two separate letters saying thanks for paying what we asked you to pay but we are still looking into this because there may be some interest left to pay, which is to say they didn't quote a correct figure of taxes owed. Then a couple months ago they sent me several hundred dollars back for overpaying. The letters they sent were confusing and must have been a waste of their time and mine.
Everyone has their IRS horror stories. For me, it was a couple years ago, starting in November of 2019, when we applied for a loan to buy this house. They wanted copies of our tax returns for the previous two years (2017, 2018), and proof that we had filed. Except that the IRS didn’t show those tax returns. They had kindly cashed the checks that I had sent in with the returns, but had no record whatsoever of the returns themselves. Still don’t know if they ever found those tax returns, though I did refile them, and did it Express Mail with return receipt. So they got the returns, they just hadn’t shown up in their system 6 months later, when I quit checking for them. I did get over this hurdle by filing my 2019 taxes in January through TurboTax. That return showed up in their system within a week.
I did apparently owed them money from 2017 or so. So, I got an appointment with the local satellite IRS office. Paid it, but the agent couldn’t find much more about what had happened to my 2017 and 2018 returns. At some point we discovered that we had some common background - we had both been programmers in previous incarnations. And I learned some interesting stuff. If you get a letter from the IRS without letterhead or fancy graphics (which are probably the most common type) , it was generated by their legacy systems. The software was developed at a time when computer screens only produced green text on a black background. No graphics whatsoever. Remember your first graphics screen? For me, I think that it was probably when I got Windows 3 on a PC. Yes. Before that. Tens, maybe hundreds, of billions of dollars spent trying to upgrade and modernize IRS computer systems, and they are still running their primary systems in the fields emulating IBM System 36 minicomputers that are no longer built. Something like that. Everything else is layered on top of these ancient legacy systems.
I shall add here that I spent a couple weeks in the latter 1980s at the IRS data center in Detroit. Already looked like WW III, but stayed across the river in Canada. In any case, it was the worst federal facility I had ever spent time in (and I spent my 15 years in software almost entirely in federal data centers around the country). It was an immense building, with linoleum tile everywhere, WW II mental furniture (40 years after the war), with echoing halls, and little privacy.
Flat tax!
My late younger brother was a case specialist with the IRS. His job was basically to help taxpayers figure out who they needed to talk to about a problem, but more importantly he triaged the callers--
Those honestly confused (most of them)
Those dishonestly pretending to be confused
Total nutbars
It was pretty stressful, and even his equable temperament was challenged.
The internal politics, and the outright partisanship of the honchoes there are much worse now than when he died in 2010.
I'm an Enrolled Agent and co-owner of a good sized tax practice.
The IRS is hopelessly behind in, well, pretty much all their essential functions. I mean months and months behind. They are actively hiring lawyers, so there is that.
It is now next to impossible to get a human on the phone anymore, and requires literally hours of waiting on hold just for the chance to talk to a human before the IRS or your telephone provider hangs up on you. Your tax professional has the same problem.
People understandably get scared when they get a letter threatening to levy their bank account but can't talk to a human to try and sort things out.
You know what the taxpayer is going to receive in lieu of a scary letter?
A bank or property levy. We used to be able to get levies released within a day. Not any more.
My advice: Make a big donation to your congress person, and to both senators. Large enough so that someone beyond an unpaid Congressional intern will make a call for you.
Seriously.
Part of the Build Back Better plan, which the dems can't seem to enact, is to hire 80,000 new IRS agents. I'm not so sure that is gonna be better for us than the current level of service.
This would be a great time to follow the Canadian truckers lead. If you put a couple thousand trucks into downtown DC you could probably shut the place down without a shot being fired.
Looking forward to their efficient matching of every combined receipt of $600 in America with the bank and third party reporting they're asking for.
It has been this way for years. Probably about 10 years ago I made a call from a CPA office with a question and left a message on an answering machine. The IRS eventually called back a few months later, so long after the fact I had forgotten making the call.
The IRS is a special hell for anyone who needs to file a W-7. I recall one circumstance where some folks in Canada needed to file one. After making some inquiries, they were advised of 4 options they could choose based on the rules at the time:
A - Drive to PA and have a notary attest to the veracity of copies of their documents (by state law, notaries in NY could not do so).
B - Drive to Ottawa to the one single Canadian government office in the whole country that could provide what the IRS needed.
C - Drive to an NYC IRS office to appear in person to have ID verified.
D - Send their original identifying documents to the IRS and hope they came back.
They chose option E, which landed them with the obligatory rejection notice.
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