It’s pretty remarkable, what happens when government is adequately funded. The Internal Revenue Service is proving it, already putting its new funding to use to making this a normal, relatively painless tax season. Just last fall, it got nearly $80 billion to spend over the next 10 years in the Inflation Reduction Act and it turned it around fast, thanks entirely to congressional Democrats and President Joe Biden. That’s the funding, by the way, that Barely Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his band of maniacs tried to repeal in their first big policy bill—the bill that would have cost the nation $114 billion over the next decade.
With enough funding, the agency is answering 90% of its phone calls, actually providing customer service. It’s processed almost every return filed so far for the year—99.7% of them so far, while also dispensing with it backlog of overdue returns. It’s got 2 million paper returns—yes, paper—from the 2022 and 2021 tax years that still need to be reviewed or corrected, down from nearly 24 million this time last year. It’s because it could finally hire enough people to both answer the phones and handle these files and maintain other systems.
“That means returns are coming in more accurately,” Timur Taluy, CEO of FileYourTaxes.com told the Washington Post. “The IRS systems are able to process them more quickly. That’s a real benefit to taxpayers.” Taluy is one of a panel of industry experts that consults with the IRS. “An appropriately funded IRS, given its skill set and people, can make a filing season work.”
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The agency has spent $847.6 million of its new funding, according to the Treasury Department, allocating about half of that to taxpayer services—answering phones and providing walk-in assistance. They’ve hired more than 5,000 people to do that, and have posted openings for 5,300 more workers. And no, they’re not being hired to audit everyone. In fact, the IRS is operating under orders from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to restrict audits to potential tax cheats making more than $400,000 a year.
You know, the people the House GOP is working for. Just $6.6 million so far has gone to enforcement.
The IRS has also spent on training and support operations, doing things like updating its ancient software to comply with current tax law and starting in on the mammoth task of modernization. “Mammoth” might actually be an understatement. They’ve got technology that dates to the 1970s. They are using equipment that’s so old, when something breaks they have to figure out how to fabricate a replacement part because the company that built the thing decades ago is long out of business.
They have people hand-entering information off of paper tax returns, because along with everything else the IRS has been saddled with, paper returns still exist. And this, which might be the saddest thing in this big story about how grim things have been for the agency: the most recent piece of technology they were using as of last summer, was a PC running on Windows XP, dating back to 2001.
That’s how the GOP has wanted it all along. It’s also handy for TurboTax and H&R Block, those big corporations who have a stranglehold on all of us who pay taxes.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
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