From Forbes.com:
Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen warned that close to
half the people trying to reach the IRS by phone might not get through
during the upcoming 2015 tax filing season. “Phone service could plummet
to 53%,” he told an audience of tax practitioners at the AICPA National
Tax Conference in Washington,
D.C. today. That would be down from an already unacceptable 72% during
the 2014 filing season. The average hold time projection: 34 minutes!
What’s to blame? Budget woes. “All we can do is try to maximize our
services as well as we can; as well as we can is still going to be
miserable. You really do get what you pay for,” he said.
Koskinen’s remarks followed National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson who
was even gloomier:“The filing season is going to be the worst filing
season since I’ve been the National Taxpayer Advocate {in 2001}; I’d
love to be proved wrong, but I think it will rival the 1985 filing
season when returns disappeared.”
There are five key factors at play – complicating the upcoming filing
season (that’s when you file your 2014 tax return). The IRS agency
budget is the number one challenge, Koskinen said. The House has voted
to cut the IRS budget for 2015 by $341 million, and the Senate has
proposed to increase it by $240 million—that would still be 7% below
2010 funding levels.
In the meantime, Congress keeps passing laws that the IRS has to
implement, namely the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) and the Foreign
Account Tax Compliance Act (“FACTA”). For example, Koskinen said the IRS
requested $430 million in 2014 from Congress to implement the ACA but
got zero, forcing it to take money out of enforcement and taxpayer
services budgets.
This will be the first filing season with two major provisions from
the Affordable Care Act –the premium tax credit and the individual
shared responsibility payment–on Form 1040. National Taxpayer Advocate
Olson said she’s very concerned about the IRS receiving accurate
information from the health exchanges. It won’t be the IRS’s fault, but
taxpayers will likely put the blame on the IRS. Koskinen touted the web pages that the IRS has created to help explain the ACA tax provisions.
Read more by clicking on this link.
