A plea to spend more money on the IRS basics…..

Here is warning against Pelosi and the Biden admin plan to give the IRS MORE power power to snoop…..

This is NOT about rich people or big organisations who hire accountants and lawyers, some of which worked for the IRS to cut down their tax liabilities …

This is about Middle Class tax payer’s….

It is suggestion that more money be spent on beefing up the present Service , whose basic mission is badly underfunded…

NY Times Op-ed by Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union, where he has worked since 1988…..

Democratic lawmakers plan to boost the Internal Revenue Service’s enforcement authority to help pay for the spending package working through Congress. But while the I.R.S. needs more funding to fulfill its mission, the current version of the reform legislation would run roughshod over decades of taxpayer protections that were enshrined by huge bipartisan majorities.

I have worked on I.R.S. administration and reform issues for my entire career, from fielding calls from distressed taxpayers facing overbearing I.R.S. actions during my first day on the job at the National Taxpayers Union to testifying before Congress. David Keating, then executive vice president of the N.T.U., served on the National Commission on Restructuring the Internal Revenue Service, whose work led to the I.R.S. Restructuring and Reform Act (R.R.A.) of 1998. The R.R.A. passed with overwhelming bipartisan support: 402 to 8 in the House and 96 to 2 in the Senate.

The R.R.A. is the heart of modern taxpayer protections. It refocused the I.R.S. on taxpayer services, solidified burden-of-proof standards in tax disputes, established the I.R.S. Oversight Board to provide expert guidance, and strengthened the office of the National Taxpayer Advocate.

But the job of protecting taxpayer rights remains unfinished. The Oversight Board has been frequently short of a quorum, rendering it impotent. The I.R.S. has also fought against constraints on its power, implementing what are called “speed-up audits” that give taxpayers less time to respond to its enforcement attempts. Representative John Lewis led passage of the Taxpayer First Act two years ago, to offer “a ray of hope” for Americans wronged by the I.R.S. Yet the new Independent Office of Appeals created under that Act to mediate taxpayer disputes has had insufficient resources during the pandemic….

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Ironically, the I.R.S.’s budget increase is unlikely to raise the revenue Congress anticipates. Estimates of the tax gap are highly uncertain. The administration projects that its $80 billion enforcement and changes to reporting requirements would yield $700 billion in revenue, but this is far beyond what othernonpartisan estimates have suggested.

The I.R.S. (and taxpayers) could indeed benefit from more funding — properly spent. The I.R.S. faces an immense backlog of tax return processing every year, caused by antiquated information technology infrastructure and a customer service staffing shortage. Some problems are basic — for example, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) found that more than 40 percent of the agency’s printers and copiers are broken. On the whole, there are 142 unimplemented recommendations that TIGTA has suggested be undertaken by the I.R.S., along with a growing list of recommendations from theGovernment Accountability Office (G.A.O.). The implementation of these recommendations would raise additional revenue each year….

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