Woo-Hoo: The IRS at the Breaking Point

Subject: Woo-Hoo: The IRS at the Breaking Point Wed Nov 06, 2019 10:26 pm

The agency and the tax-collection system it oversees are on the brink of catastrophic collapse.

Woo-Hoo: The IRS at the Breaking Point Irs-building-washington-dc

Woo-Hoo: The IRS at the Breaking Point Irs-building-washington-dc

Anyone who deals with the IRS on a regular basis knows that the agency is in trouble: IRS employees are less able than ever to effectively and efficiently handle their work. The internal problems facing the agency were greatly exacerbated by the 35-day government shutdown that began in late December of last year. But the shutdown is not by any means solely responsible for the agency’s dire situation.
To put all this in better perspective, let me give you pictures of what the agency looked like before the shutdown, and what it has looked like after the shutdown.

What the IRS Faced before the Five-Week Shutdown
According to the National Taxpayer Advocate’s 2018 annual report, the shutdown

Quote :: Could not have come at a worse time for the IRS — facing its first filing season implementing a massive new tax law, with a completely restructured tax form. As I outline below, the IRS is entering the filing season inundated with correspondence, phone calls, and inventories of unresolved prior year audits and identity theft cases.

Let’s drill into these challenges in more detail.
Implementing the “postcard” tax return. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) contained more than 80 changes to the tax code, many of them substantial. Among the most challenging was the law’s mandate to create a “postcard-sized” tax return, which necessitated the redesign of the three major personal-income-tax returns, Forms 1040, 1040A, and 1040EZ.
Along with creating a new tax return, the IRS had to design and create six new schedules to go with the new return. The reason is that the law’s mandate that the 1040 form be “postcard-sized” didn’t take into consideration all the supporting information that has to go with a tax return, such as Schedule A for itemized deductions, Schedule C for self-employed persons, etc. Those forms were not eliminated. So the redesign of Form 1040 actually created more steps in the return-preparation process than existed under the old design.
Nevertheless, the IRS had to churn out the new forms in time to get the design specs and coding to private tax-prep-software companies, and to reprogram its own computers to process the new forms, all well before the start of the 2018 filing season, which began on February 1, 2019.

More: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/irs-tax-collection-system-brink-of-collapse/

taxistheft

Subject: Re: Woo-Hoo: The IRS at the Breaking Point Sun Nov 10, 2019 4:02 pm

Woo-Hoo: The IRS at the Breaking Point

Woo-Hoo: The IRS at the Breaking Point

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