IRS PUSH TO REDUCE BACKLOG

[Lee B]

"The Internal Revenue Service is temporarily re-assigning 1,200 employees to the frontlines of a challenging 2022 tax season to deal with a daunting backlog of last year’s paper returns and mail from taxpayers.

People who have worked as customer-service representatives, tax examiners and clerks in the IRS’s “accounts management” operations during the last two fiscal years are some of the existing staffers that the tax collection agency is gathering for its “Inventory Surge Team,” IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig explained in a message to staffers on Wednesday evening.

“This is an all-hands-on-deck situation to help people as quickly as possible, and reduce the stress on employees who have been and continue to face unprecedented levels of inventory to be worked,” Rettig’s message said.

The IRS is looking at various ways to help taxpayers and the temporary reassignment of 1,200 employees is one way to do it, a spokesman said. The employees will remain in their re-assigned roles through September, he said."

[Lee B]

"We are suspending automated collection notices normally issued when a taxpayer owes additional tax or has no record of filing a tax return,” said Rettig. “Note that many other IRS notices are statutorily required to be issued within a certain time frame to be legally valid. In some situations, it might seem that we should modify a portion of a system to provide taxpayer relief. Unfortunately, because we have not had the resources to invest in more modern technology that allows us to contain the effects of one change on the broader technological ecosystem, it must be acknowledged that we may not be able to do so without jeopardizing the overall operating system."

"The agency has also implemented mandatory overtime for the first time in certain functions, Rettig noted."

[Lee B]

Suspended Notices  -  CP80, CP501, CP502, CP503, 2802C

[mcb39]

Too little, too late!

[Lee B]

According to the Taxpayer Advocate's testimony to Congress today a second surge team is being pulled together.

[Lee B]

 

"National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins recently told members of the Senate Finance Committee that the agency needs to get to a "stable and healthy condition so it can perform its core mission."

. . . . . . . .

She said the IRS reports that "all paper and electronic individual refund returns received prior to April 2021 have been processed if the return had no errors and did not require further review." But she added, "by implication, that means returns filed as far back as April of last year are still awaiting processing."