Democratic Biden and Congress have an inept IRS

[a425couple]

(So, Joe Biden ran for President promising to deliver
competent government, and that he would deliver moderation,
not ultra-libereal stuff. So, what have they been pushing?
Crazy stupid ultra expensive 4 TRILLION $ BBB, rather then
simple competent government services. The IRS can not
answer simple tax payer questions!)

from
https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report/customer-service-at-the-irs-is-so-bad-even-tax-pros-are-fed-up

Customer Service at the IRS Is So Bad, Even Tax Pros Are Fed Up
Jan. 4, 2022, 1:00 AM
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Tax preparer Jan Roberg rang what she calls the “bat phone”: a dedicated
customer service line at the Internal Revenue Service that’s supposed to
connect professionals like her to a human right away. She was put on
hold, as she figured she would be. So she went to the Burger King next
to her office to pick up lunch.

She was still on hold when she got back. “Even five years ago, I would
get through right away,” says Roberg, of St. Louis. Now it typically
takes more than an hour.

Reaching the IRS has always been an exercise in patience. But years of
budget cuts have pushed the agency to the limit. Its customer service
workforce has shrunk more than 40% since 2010, according to the most
recent data, and the agency is struggling to fill vacancies amid a labor
shortage—handcuffed by a federal pay scale that starts college graduates
at little more than fast-food wages.

IRS representatives answered fewer than 1 in 10 phone calls during the
2021 tax-filing season, according to National Taxpayer Advocate Erin
Collins, who heads an independent arm of the agency designed to help
taxpayers resolve problems. Even in off-peak periods the agency is
answering only about 4 in 10.

The main role of the IRS is, of course, to collect taxes. But during the
Covid-19 pandemic it was also put in charge of doling out billions of
dollars in direct checks and advance payments on the child tax credit.
The agency received 24.6 million calls related to stimulus payments from
when they were authorized in March 2020 to Nov. 28 of that year,
according to the IRS’s internal watchdog.

Last season’s call volume was almost four times what it was during the
2018 filing season. During one spike in March 2021, the agency says, it
received as many as 1,500 calls per second.

The prospects for this filing season don’t look much better: Many
Americans will have to reconcile their child tax credit payments on
their 2021 returns, for example, which will likely generate a lot of
calls. And not only has the number of calls soared, but it’s also taking
employees longer to handle some issues over the phone because of recent
tax law changes.

The pressure on the agency prompted President Joe Biden to include
call-center changes in a Dec. 13 executive order aimed at improving
customer service across a dozen federal departments. He instructed the
IRS to give taxpayers the option to schedule customer support callbacks.

In Congress, a provision in the Democrats’ “Build Back Better” package
would give the IRS $80 billion in additional funding over the next 10
years. The proposal has top agency officials planning to hire more
employees and roll out new technologies.

Just adding funding is unlikely to translate into filled seats at call
centers. In Austin, IRS customer service employees make a starting
salary of less than $37,000 a year, says Eddie Walker, president of the
National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 247 there. The figure reflects
a 2.74% raise that just took effect, he says.

“At the starting pay level, we’re competing with the fast-food
industry,” Walker says.

The job is “way more involved” than fast food, with high stress and
“unreasonable expectations,” says Jason Sisk, president of the NTEU
Chapter 97 in Fresno, Calif. “It makes it hard to get up to where [the
agency needs] to be and sustain the number of employees that they need.”

Funding for the agency to boost enforcement and hiring has bipartisan
support in Congress, improving the chances it will survive if Build Back
Better negotiations progress in 2022.

Senator Rob Portman, a Republican from Ohio, says the agency’s customer
service improved for a time from the early 2000s. “But then we fell off
over successive years because of a lack of commitment to taxpayer
service and a lack of funding,” he says.

Maryland Senator Ben Cardin, a Democrat, says ramping up enforcement
while simultaneously improving customer service is a challenge. “We’re
focused on trying to collect the taxes that are due. There’s as much as
a trillion-dollar tax gap every year,” Cardin says. “So it’s a twofold
problem.”

A newly opened IRS call center in Puerto Rico employs 400 people, and
the agency plans to open more if Congress increases its funding. IRS
officials are also planning to roll out changes in existing centers this
year, including using natural-language bots to walk taxpayers through
frequently asked questions on the phone. The planned changes are
designed to drive traffic to the agency’s website, so taxpayers can, for
example, set up a payment plan with a robochat rather than a live
person, addressing their needs, says Darren Guillot, commissioner of
collection for the IRS’s Small Business and Self-Employed Division.

The phone issues are such that some tax professionals are paying for
robots to hold their place in line. A startup called EnQ Inc. offers a
service, starting at about $100 a month, that makes robocalls to the
agency’s special practitioner line (i.e., the bat phone), waits on hold,
and then, when it makes a connection, puts the client through to an IRS
agent. Andrew Valiente, the founder and chief executive officer of EnQ,
declined to comment for this article.

A bipartisan group of senators urged the IRS in November to investigate
the company’s practices, saying that by “flooding the IRS lines” with
robocalls it may be exacerbating the agency’s poor response rate.

“It doesn’t look that good that you can pay to get heard by the IRS and
‘Joe on the street’ has to wait in line for four hours before they get
their ‘courtesy disconnect,’” says Bill Smith, a managing director at
the accounting and business services company CBIZ Inc., referring to an
agency euphemism for when the overloaded switchboard hangs up on a caller.

More money “would go a long way toward helping that situation,” Smith
says of the potential for new resources. “Is it going to happen
immediately, even with the funding? I don’t think so.”

Using the IRS website is far more efficient than waiting on the phone,
Guillot says. “When you want to reach the IRS, you expect us to answer
the phone,” he says. “We know we want to do better, but we only have so
many people to answer so many phone calls.”

To contact the authors of this story:
David Hood in Arlington at dho...@bloomberg.net

Allyson Versprille in Washington at aversp...@bloomberg.net

Kaustuv Basu in Arlington at kba...@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Amanda Kolson Hurley at ahur...@bloomberg.net

Bernie Kohn

© 2022 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

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David Hood
Allyson Versprille
Allyson Versprille
Bloomberg News
Kaustuv Basu
Kaustuv Basu
Reporter
Topics
return preparers
pay structures
federal agency budget
filing tax returns
federal tax
child credit
collection of tax
coronavirus
economic stimulus payments
individual income tax
hiring
Companies
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