| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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To be the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. | |
| On C-SPAN 3, also at 10, CIA Director John Radcliffe, FBI Director Kash Patel, and other officials will give their assessment of worldwide threats before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. | ||
| These events also stream live on the free C-SPAN Now video app and online at c-span.org. | ||
| Democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
| Democracy is worth dying for. | ||
| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
| We are here in the sanctuary of democracy. | ||
| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
| American democracy is bigger than any one person. | ||
| Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected. | ||
|
unidentified
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We are still at our core, a democracy. | |
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
| Joining us now to discuss Doge's impact on the IRS and taxpayer data privacy is Nina Olson, Executive Director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights. | ||
| Nina, thank you for being with us. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| I know you've been on the show many times, but remind our audience about Nisan Art for Taxpayer Rights, the mission, and who funds it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So the Center for Taxpayer Rights was created when I left the IRS as the National Taxpayer Advocate in 2019, pretty much to continue the work that I'd been doing all along, looking at taxpayer rights, how they impacted taxpayers' compliance, not just in the United States, but around the world. | ||
| We're funded by many different sources, different foundations, Rockefeller, Robert Wood Johnson's. | ||
| We also get IRS funding for running a low-income taxpayer clinic, a movement that I've been involved in since 1992. | ||
| You've talked about some of your background. | ||
| You've worked in the area for many years, served almost two decades as the IRS National Taxpayer Advocate. | ||
| What did that entail? | ||
|
unidentified
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So the Taxpayer Advocate is, the National Taxpayer Advocate is a position that Congress created to and lead an organization inside the IRS to help taxpayers solve their problems with the IRS and make legislative and administrative recommendations to mitigate those problems. | |
| And it's basically the safety net inside the IRS where taxpayers may be having an economic problem because of something the IRS is doing or not doing or about to do and that just can't be addressed quickly enough. | ||
| And so you want to avoid that harm. | ||
| The other thing is there may be an issue where the taxpayers tried many, many times to resolve the problem through normal channels of the IRS and just can't get that taken care of. | ||
| And that's when you can also come to task when there's a taxpayer advocate service or task where there's a systemic problem. | ||
| Well, let's talk about the state of the IRS. | ||
| There are reports that they're preparing to reduce their workforce by about 50% through layoffs and buyouts, reduction of 20% of its staff by May 15th, which is after tax day. | ||
| But it's already, they've laid off around 7,000 and set to close about more than 100 offices as well. | ||
| Talk about what it means for taxpayer filing, maybe this season, but in seasons ahead as well. | ||
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unidentified
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Well, I think it's both this season and future seasons. | |
| I think there's a myth that quote-unquote filing season ends after April 15th or May 15th. | ||
| You know, first of all, 20% of the individual taxpayers file extensions until October 15th. | ||
| So you've got a fifth of the taxpayers whose returns have not yet been processed. | ||
| The second thing is that there are a whole bunch of returns that have been stopped by the IRS because there's all this talk about waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| There's some questions about the return. | ||
| And so those returns are frozen until the taxpayer can provide the IRS more information or resolve certain issues. | ||
| They may be victims of identity theft. | ||
| All of those employees are people that are sort of tied up in the filing season and as they get through just the file, you know, the immediate filing season, they start working on these other things. | ||
| So what it means just for this year is that taxpayers will not get through to the IRS on the phone to be able to resolve their problems. | ||
| People will not be able to process their correspondence timely. | ||
| And the other point, and I'm sure I'll come back to this over and over again, is a lot of what the IRS does is automated. | ||
| There's a lot of talk about making them more automated, digital, digital, but they do a lot of stuff automated. | ||
| And unless a taxpayer is able to get through to the IRS, when the IRS is saying, we think you owe us more money or we're going to take this collection action, unless you can get through, the automation kicks in and the next thing you know, your account is being levied on your bank account and you can't get through to anybody to unwind that. | ||
| And that's what we're looking forward to as there's more automation and fewer employees to address the legitimate issues that taxpayers are raising. | ||
| If we focus on this tax season that we're in right now, maybe we get through the tax day, April 15th. | ||
| Maybe we get through the summer to October when those extensions kick in. | ||
| But are cuts, any future cuts that we could see, is it sustainable for the work of the IRS? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I mean, there are two components of that. | |
| One is, are they cutting taxpayer service, taxpayer-facing functions for assistance? | ||
| And then the other thing is, and there seems to be a lot of focus on cutting what people call the enforcement side, and I look at as sort of the approaches to bringing people into compliance, making sure that people pay the correct amount. | ||
| And there, you know, some of the most complicated cases require the most skilled employees. | ||
| And what we're all concerned about is that, you know, the IRS has been trying to build up the skills to be able to make the system more fair to go out and audit those folks that are really the most sophisticated taxpayers, et cetera, that have ways of avoiding taxes that a wage earner doesn't have. | ||
| And if you eliminate those employees and you cut those employees, then you're actually making the entire tax system more unfair. | ||
| And that's what we really, and then you also have the downstream consequence that taxpayers will say, well, the IRS has been gutted, so why do I need to comply with the law? | ||
| You know, I can do this, I can do that, and they'll never find me. | ||
| The other thing we want to talk about is another Doge effort is they're seeking access to the integrated data retrieval system that holds personal taxpayer identification numbers and as well as bank information. | ||
| Your organization is a lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the IRS because they're trying to access that information. | ||
| What can you tell us about, I guess, the lawsuit, not specifically the lawsuit, but tell us about what's happening and what information has already been turned over? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I think we don't know. | |
| That's part of the problem. | ||
| We're not in the discovery phase right now. | ||
| What we do understand is that in another case, the Treasury Department has said that they're not having that kind of access related to the Bureau of Fiscal Service, and they interpret that agreement as applying also to the IRS. | ||
| That is not to say that people don't want that kind of access, and that's what we're looking at is what will ultimately be resolved. | ||
| Taxpayers need to understand that Congress has said that tax returns and tax return information is confidential unless it is expressly authorized in the Internal Revenue Code under Section 6103. | ||
| And that's where all the battles are occurring. | ||
| Nina Olson, the executive director of Center for Taxpayer Rights, is our guest for the next 30, 35 minutes or so. | ||
| If you have a question or comment for her, you can start calling. | ||
| And now the lines, Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Nina, talking more about the access to information. | ||
| Do we know what it is exactly they're looking for? | ||
| And if they were to get it, what would they be trying to do with it? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, we don't know exactly. | |
| They've been saying fraud, waste, and abuse, and there are a lot of human beings in the IRS who are experts in that subject and spend their lives looking at tax returns and tax return information in order to identify returns that are fraudulent, returns that are incorrect, and returns where taxpayers could benefit from some education. | ||
| So there's a lot of activity in that area, so it's not quite sure what Doge is bringing in there. | ||
| What we have heard, public statements saying it would be great to get all IRS data and share it with health and human services, share it with the state welfare agencies, create a mega database. | ||
| And that's precisely the kind of exposure that Congress in 1976 clawed back from the executive branch in order to give taxpayers some assurance that when they gave some of their most personal information to the IRS, that that wouldn't be shared elsewhere in the government unless there was a compelling need that Congress decided was a compelling need. | ||
| And kind of it's interesting, it's important to know the background. | ||
| You know, like when we first had the Internal Revenue Code that we have today, which was passed, you know, authorized by the 16th Amendment of the Constitution and came about in 1913, the executive, the president, could decide who could get tax return information. | ||
| And the lists of taxpayers were published and newspapers could publish them. | ||
| And, you know, there were times when Congress said, we want you to file in the court recorder's office, the local registrar's office, a little pink slip that had your name and your Social Security number and how much you owed and how much you made. | ||
| And then they repealed that before that went into effect. | ||
| You fast forward to the Nixon administration, and there were two things that happened. | ||
| One was the concern that the executive, the president, was trying to get information about his enemies and have them be audited by the IRS. | ||
| And the other side was he wanted to stop audits of his friends. | ||
| But the second thing was the Agriculture Department wanted the tax returns of all the farmers of America. | ||
| And that led Congress in 1976 to pass the current law, which is he grabbed it from the executive branch and said, no, no, no, we decide who gets taxpayer information, and it has to be in the internal revenue code. | ||
| There have been other challenges when Doge has gone into access information. | ||
| Various department judges have said that if anything has been downloaded, it needs to be deleted or destroyed. | ||
| Is there a way of knowing that that's actually happening? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, if you had inspector generals, they would be able to see that that was happening. | |
| You have to believe in the rule of law that the lawyers who value their ability to practice law in the states and the federal courts would not lie to the courts when they verify that that has actually happened. | ||
| We have callers waiting to talk with you. | ||
| We will start with Colleen in Newton, Massachusetts, line for Republicans. | ||
| Hi, Colleen. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello. | |
| I have a question for Nina about filing a special form. | ||
| I think it's a 701 form that defers any tax payment for people who are giving large amounts, greater than $15,000 a year, to their children. | ||
| Because I ran into some serious difficulties with the IRS because I didn't understand how to do that properly. | ||
| Well, I think the form that you're referring to is basically the form where you report that you've made a taxable gift during your lifetime, which is over the annual exclusion amount. | ||
| And right now, that's $16,000 or whatever. | ||
| But it's a form that you fill out, and even if you've made over the annual exclusion amount, you can elect to have the overage covered by your lifetime exclusion, where you can give several million dollars, you know, passing it on at the time of your death without having to pay estate tax. | ||
| So you have to fill out that form correctly and their due dates, and otherwise they will make penalties and they will say that the election has not occurred properly. | ||
| So I think that's kind of where you are. | ||
| If you don't have an attorney or a CPA that can help you with that, there may be some ability to get around the late filing if there's reasonable cause. | ||
| But the other thing is that this is actually a really clear example where someone just makes a mistake because they don't understand a complex area of law, and you don't want to say that they're a criminal just because they've just made a mistake. | ||
| And you want the law to understand and the employees to understand that it was an inadvertent mistake because of the complexity of the law. | ||
| And there should be an ability to waive penalties at least where it's just due to the complexity and inadvertence. | ||
| Mary Ann in Philadelphia, line for Democrats. | ||
| Hi, Mary Ann. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi. | |
| I have a question again, too. | ||
| Same thing on one of my or my standard Pen40 form. | ||
| I'm filing it this year. | ||
| I received $600 on a 50-50 chance I won. | ||
| And they gave me a W-2G form to file with my income tax. | ||
| I file the standard. | ||
| I do not file anything else. | ||
| Can I just add this $600 in as additional income? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You can file any other forms. | ||
| Yeah, it's a W-2G, and you just report it where you would report your W-2 income. | ||
| The IRS will have received that information and will know, will be looking for you to report that income. | ||
| And if they don't see it on your return, then they will likely send you a notice sometime in August saying you have underreported your income and here's the little additional tax that you owe. | ||
| Callers have been asking questions about their taxes forms. | ||
| It's one of those that, as you pointed out, people may not be able to get a hold of somebody at the IRS in the future to be asking these questions. | ||
| We can't have you on all the time. | ||
| So, where can people go to find information or get help when they need it if the IRS isn't there to answer their calls? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, the IRS is a huge website, and there's lots of information on there. | |
| It's not easy to navigate. | ||
| You know, you can try some of the, you can put it into Google or some of your search engines and try the artificial intelligence. | ||
| You know, the problem with that is you don't know whether it's accurate or not. | ||
| I would say keep an eye out for your local radio stations because they will often have call-in programs where CPAs and enrolled agents experts will answer general questions. | ||
| And there is a tax law line for the IRS with some automated responses. | ||
| So, there's a lot out there. | ||
| It's just navigating it that's very challenging. | ||
| Let's talk with Rodney in Miami, Line for Republicans. | ||
| Hi, Rodney. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hey, morning. | |
| You know, I think you've got to understand why people don't like the IRS. | ||
| I think part of it started when you had Lois Lerner under Obama going after conservative groups and using IRS information. | ||
| And then you had IRS information about Trump leaked. | ||
| And then you had Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, you know, who investigated the Biden administration or Hunter Biden. | ||
| And they were told they could not investigate any further. | ||
|
unidentified
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The juice was not worth the squeeze. | |
| I had a personal experience with the IRS that caused me to sour on the IRS about 15 years ago. | ||
| I had my own company and I ran it for 10 years. | ||
| I had a CPA that used to advise me to do things that later on, in perspective, I thought, well, maybe I shouldn't have done this or done that. | ||
| So I went back and hired a CPA firm to go back and audit like eight years. | ||
| I had my own company, eight years of my tax returns, and they found out that I owed, based on their perspective, I owed a certain amount of money. | ||
| I was dumb enough to contact the IRS and say, I've gone back and audited. | ||
| I think I owe you money. | ||
| If you'll give me a certain amount of time, I will pay you. | ||
| Like, can you give me a month and a half and I'll, because I had to go sell something to go pay the extra money. | ||
| The IRS said, we will not wait. | ||
| If you don't have it paid by this Friday, we're putting a lien on everything that you have. | ||
| They proceeded to put a lien. | ||
| It stayed on there seven years. | ||
| They would not work with me. | ||
| I felt like the biggest dummy in the world because I raised my hand and said I owed the federal government so much money and they would not give me a chance to pay it. | ||
| So I want you to know the IRS, they have not operated in a respectable, cooperative manner. | ||
| If they come after you, they're going to come after you. | ||
| And if you want to know why people are upset with them, these are some of the examples. | ||
| Well, you know, I think that you raise many good points here. | ||
| And let me just say, you know, that in my own background, I mean, I've been working in tax administration for five decades. | ||
| This year is my 50th year working in taxes. | ||
| And, you know, I used to represent folks like you in, you know, in discussions with the IRS and collection actions. | ||
| And, you know, when I became the National Taxpayer Advocate, collection was a major focus of mine, and particularly the lien filing, because I felt that the IRS was just scattershot filing liens in an automatic way. | ||
| And this goes back to my point about how so much is automated and will only get worse if we have fewer people. | ||
| Now, the people that you need to have in the IRS are folks who are trained to listen to taxpayers such as yourselves. | ||
| And just from a perspective, it makes no sense with someone like you who's saying, here's my asset, I need to sell it, and I will pay you in a month and a half, and the IRS can see that asset, that then they should hold off. | ||
| They don't need to put a lien on immediately, particularly when you're coming forward. | ||
| And I think you also demonstrate how one interaction can actually destroy trust in the IRS for 15 years and going forward. | ||
| And that's my main point is that what we need to be advocating for is better trained human beings, you know, certainly using automation and digitalization and artificial intelligence to identify risks of fraud or risks of non-compliance. | ||
| But there needs to be a trained human being who understands the challenges that taxpayers are experiencing and listening to them on the other side. | ||
| And in this environment, you know, I fear for who's willing to work for the IRS at this point when it's being beaten up and so lamb-basted. | ||
| And I do think that the IRS has made some progress in the last couple of years being able to bring on new employees and younger employees who have a fresh look at things. | ||
| But, you know, now, who knows what's going to happen. | ||
| I'm sorry what you experienced. | ||
| And that is actually the exact kind of case that the Taxpayer Advocate Service should have intervened in immediately, you know, to stop the lien and say, you can wait 45 days while this gentleman sells his assets and is able to pay this tax. | ||
| And that's exactly the kind of economic harm that I was talking about in getting a case into the Taxpayer Advocate Service. | ||
| Nina, a question coming in from Text Message Rich in Kingsport, Tennessee asked, please ask the guest exactly what, quote, most personal information to which the IRS has access and exactly what are people afraid that Doge employees would do with it, do with this information that ordinary IRS employees wouldn't do. | ||
|
unidentified
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So that's a really good question. | |
| So just think about your tax return, what you're reporting on it, and what you get back from your filing your taxes. | ||
| It has all of your wages, all of your employers. | ||
| It has your address. | ||
| It has your social security number, your name, your children, your children's social security numbers. | ||
| It has your health information if you're claiming medical expenses, if you're claiming premium tax credit. | ||
| It says whether or not you are eligible for the earned income credit, a benefit for the working poor and middle-class working individuals in this country. | ||
| And with that information, an identity thief can basically become you. | ||
| And so that's what's incredibly important there. | ||
| And in the IRS, only certain employees have access to certain information depending on their job duties. | ||
| I was a national taxpayer advocate for 18 years, and I never had access to any IRS data system that involved tax return or taxpayer information. | ||
| When I needed to work a case, there were my employees who did have access because their jobs entailed working with taxpayers and helping them solve their problems. | ||
| And they could provide me the information I needed. | ||
| But I did not need, it was not in my job duties to have access to those systems. | ||
| And part of the problem with that is that you could inadvertently access somebody else's returns, or you could actually access someone's returns and make them public as Craig Littlejohn did with President Trump's and some of the richest people in the United States, which was a violation of law and an abomination against taxpayer confidentiality. | ||
| Now, we don't know what Doge is saying that they want to do. | ||
| They are saying that they want to identify fraud, waste, and abuse, but they have not articulated what they're going to be able to do more than the IRS employees whose jobs it is to identify fraud, waste, and abuse. | ||
| The IRS has major fraud detection filters, some of which are good, some of which are really problematic, you know, to identify, you know, errors on returns, questionable refund claims, identity theft and fraud, those sorts of things. | ||
| Now, if Doge wants to come in and look at the effectiveness of those returns, it doesn't need to see actual taxpayer data. | ||
| It can have anonymized data and run those systems to see how those systems work. | ||
| And that is what researchers in the IRS do, is that they work first with anonymized data to identify some patterns, and then they give that data to the actual people who have authorization to look at the actual information taxpayers have filed to then explore what the issues are and update the programming. | ||
| Let's hear from Russell in Massachusetts, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Hi, Russell. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi. | |
| Hello. | ||
| Go ahead, Russell. | ||
| You're on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm 77 years old, and I was getting notices back in November and December of 2024 that I was eligible to file a tax return for 2021 for the stimulus, | |
| the $1,400 stimulus that the Treasury Department sent out to everybody in their, there were checks that were mailed in the mail. | ||
| They were deposited into people's accounts, in their Social Security accounts. | ||
| And I went to HR Block in my city, and they filed a they went on the internet, and I showed, I showed them where the tax, if you didn't get that stimulus, you had until May of this year, 2025, to file a tax return and try and get that stimulus. | ||
| So I called my bank, and I checked my account from January of 2021 until June of 2021, and there was no $1,400 deposit made into my account. | ||
| So the HR Block filed the tax return for me. | ||
| It was called the Recovery Rebate or whatever, something or other. | ||
| It was on the internet. | ||
| And they filed the return. | ||
| It cost me $120 to file it. | ||
| And I was supposed to get $1,200. | ||
| And I owed $101 of tax for that year because of one of the gambling forms that I sent in along with my Social Security statement and my pension statement. | ||
| And so I assumed that they would deduct the tax from the $1,400 stimulus. | ||
| Well, I filed it the week, like within 10 days after January 1st. | ||
| I got a notice in the mail about 10 days ago from the IRS saying that I owed $248 on that tax return. | ||
| So I called up the IRS number. | ||
| It took, I stayed on my phone for 40 minutes. | ||
| Someone finally answered the phone. | ||
| It was almost 45 minutes. | ||
| And I told her the situation. | ||
| She went and checked on the records of my Social Security number and said that I got the stimulus. | ||
| But I have the bank statements from that first six months of that year, 2021. | ||
| And I can prove that I did not receive that $1,400 stimulus. | ||
| Okay, Russell, we'll get a response from Nina in your situation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So the letter that you've got is saying that you owe the IRS money. | |
| You might get a letter. | ||
| You should write in and protest that saying you did not receive the stimulus. | ||
| And if you want to, you could send in, you know, your copies of your bank statement for those months showing that there was no deposit. | ||
| What you can do is you can get a trace on the payment. | ||
| Now, this takes a long time. | ||
| Bureau of Fiscal Services is actually the one that makes the payments and they can say what account that payment was paid into. | ||
| And then you will ultimately get this. | ||
| There are two things I would suggest that you do, and I forget where you're located. | ||
| Massachusetts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pardon? | |
| Massachusetts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Massachusetts. | |
| There are very good low-income taxpayer clinics in Massachusetts who can represent you in this so you don't have to sit on the phone for 40 minutes talking to the IRS. | ||
| And there's one at Harvard Law School. | ||
| You can go and just Google, put into your search engine, low-income taxpayer clinic, Massachusetts, and you will come up with a list of the clinics, and they represent you for free. | ||
| And it sounds like you might be eligible for this, but they can also just give you advice as to how specifically to proceed. | ||
| You can show them the letter that you got, and they can tell you where you are. | ||
| The other thing that I can say is you can go to the Taxpayer Advocate Service. | ||
| They are really swamped with cases. | ||
| And partly because of what's happening with the IRS, people aren't able to get their problems resolved because of all the turmoil at the IRS. | ||
| And so, but I would say go to the low-income taxpayer clinics in Massachusetts. | ||
| And if you can't get, if they can't help you because your income is too high, you can always go to the Taxpayer Advocate Service. | ||
| But you should also write in and protest what they're doing and saying you disagree, you do not agree with that. | ||
| Nina, the Washington Post is reporting that the Trump administration is set to cut 20% of the staff at the Taxpayer Advocate Service where you served. | ||
| You just said that they're already busy right now. | ||
| Talk about the impact of taxpayers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've published an article this morning in the Tax Press that shows that, you know, a year after I joined the Taxpayer Advocate Service in 2002, there were 1,350 case advocates, people working cases for taxpayers. | |
| And the whole point about the Taxpayer Advocate Service was when you get a case into TAS because you're experiencing this harm, there's one person assigned to your case. | ||
| And you have an 800 number that goes directly to that person's phone on that person's desk. | ||
| So in 2020, you know, at the time of the pandemic, there were 670 case advocates, 50% fewer case advocates than when I started at the Taxpayer Advocate Service. | ||
| On the other hand, their caseload per case advocate had gone up 83%. | ||
| So that's what you're seeing right now: way fewer case advocates, and each case advocate has an 83% larger caseload than when I came into the taxpayer advocate service. | ||
| And so the idea that you would cut even more when the taxpayer advocate service is the safety net for the people who've called in with these examples, they are exactly those cases that the taxpayer advocate service is supposed to help with. | ||
| And if the case advocates have this kind of overwhelming caseload, they can't give the attention that's needed to the kinds of issues that we're seeing where people really need help navigating the IRS and can't afford to go to a lawyer. | ||
| Let's talk with Alex in Bayer, Delaware, Line for Republicans. | ||
| Hi, Alex. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I just wanted to say Biden wants to hire 80,000 IRS people to work. | ||
| That's idiotic. | ||
| You know how much money that costs? | ||
| Can people add and subtract? | ||
| You think you're going to get that money back for what you're paying these people? | ||
| And another thing is them people that's supposed to be overseeing stuff, the general, whatever they call him, that he fired, they wasn't doing their job. | ||
| If you find fraud and abuse and everything, how are they doing their job? | ||
| You're saying that he's watching over everything and they got rid of him. | ||
| Why do you think they got rid of him? | ||
| I sort of missed the second half of the question, but the first part of the question about, you know, the employees being hired and how much would you ever make it back? | ||
| In fact, on the enforcement side, there are clear numbers. | ||
| It's anywhere between $6 to $12, depending on what the employee is doing, that you get back for every dollar that you're spending on an IRS, you know, enforcement slash compliance person. | ||
| On the taxpayer service side, it's very hard to do a measure of return on investment for taxpayer service, except every business in the world knows that if you're customer-facing, customer service is what helps you generate sales. | ||
| So I think that that's not correct. | ||
| There's also been recent work done by Congressional Budget Office and other places that have shown that when you eliminate these IRS employees that are working on these high-income and large corporate audits, you are really losing revenue coming in to the federal government. | ||
| And I will say that I think that one of the problems, and I just referenced this, that it's hard to measure the return on investment for taxpayer service. | ||
| That's one of the reasons why in the Inflation Reduction Act, the legislation that was passed under President Biden to give more money to the IRS, a lot of it was put in the enforcement bucket because the law is being required to pay for itself. | ||
| And you can't get a cost, a return on investment on taxpayer service under the budget rules, which is really silly, but that's just the way it is. | ||
| One of the things that I've been really advocating is move some of those positions out of enforcement into IT to make the system more modernized, continue its modernization efforts, and also into taxpayer service so someone like the previous caller doesn't have to sit on the phone for 40 minutes trying to get his problems solved. | ||
| Former IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel resigned his position the day that President Trump took office for his second term. | ||
| President Trump has nominated former GOP Congressman Billy Long to replace him. | ||
| Remind our audience the roles and responsibility of the IRS Commissioner and your thoughts on his nomination. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, the Commissioner is charged by law to administer the tax laws. | |
| And he is also required, and I have to take some credit for this, to ensure that his employees and his officers are trained on and adhere to all of the taxpayer rights that are in the Internal Revenue Code, including the taxpayer Bill of Rights, which are 10 commitments, 10 rights that taxpayers have under the law. | ||
| That is his job. | ||
| And one of those rights is confidentiality of return information. | ||
| So the nominee has not been given his confirmation hearing. | ||
| So I will look forward to hearing what he has to say about all of the protections that are the strong protections in the Internal Revenue Code, including the confidentiality of return information. | ||
| We have about five minutes left with Nina Olson, Executive Director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights. | ||
| Remember, a reminder to our audience that at 10 a.m., we will be going to live coverage of the Supreme Court as they hear oral arguments on a Louisiana gerrybandering case. | ||
| Tracy in North Carolina, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Hi, Tracy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello. | |
| I'm calling because the IRS is really helpful when you need to call them on the telephone. | ||
| So they need to be there. | ||
| I recently sold the house in North Carolina, and I only stayed in the house for nine months. | ||
| And I gave my tax preparer a CPA that's supposed to be knowledgeable about the tax law, but he did not put it on my tax return. | ||
| So when I called the IRS, they told me that you have to stay in the house two years before you get the tax break. | ||
| The IRS has sent me an audit paper for over $400,000. | ||
| So I had to get my tax preparer to resend the tax papers. | ||
| And I recently got a letter back six months ago stating that I didn't owe anything. | ||
| But the IRS has to know that the people that put their taxes in and give it to a CPA, they are a lay person of the law. | ||
| I had no idea that, you know, that, you know, you, I gave him the 1099 form and he didn't put it on because he was thinking that I stayed in the house two years, even though I had spoken to him about that. | ||
| So that's my comment. | ||
| Yeah, so a couple things there. | ||
| You started by saying, you know, people need to be able to talk to the IRS by phone. | ||
| And that is something that I've said to everyone. | ||
| You know, dealing with the IRS is not the same thing as buying something on Amazon. | ||
| And by the way, try to get somebody on Amazon on the phone to talk about a problem, you know, or do their chats. | ||
| It's not exactly customer friendly. | ||
| You know, it's not like buying an airline ticket. | ||
| These are taxes. | ||
| And the IRS has awesome collection powers once it determines that there's a debt that you owe. | ||
| And so taxpayers want to talk to someone on the phone. | ||
| They don't like talking to the IRS, but they want to talk to someone so that they know that the IRS has heard them. | ||
| If there is an adjustment being made, they want to hear somebody saying that that has been made, and they get a letter back that shows it as well. | ||
| Now, you had to file an amended return, and I think that goes to, I can't speak to your CPA's abilities, but you've done everything you could. | ||
| You provided the information. | ||
| There is a provision that allows the IRS, there are automatic penalties, automatic penalties that go on if you haven't paid tax, but you can ask for those penalties to be waived because you relied on your preparer and you provided that preparer with all the information that the preparer needed to fill the return in right. | ||
| And so, therefore, you could ask for those penalties to be waived. | ||
| You'd still be liable for the tax. | ||
| But it sounds like you got the right result. | ||
| But you just raised several really important points. | ||
| Mary in Ohio on the Line for Independence. | ||
| Hi, Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello, thank you. | |
| Just a quick question. | ||
| When I pay my local property taxes here in Ohio, I can go online in my county and I can see, okay, they received my payment and everything's in order. | ||
| I just need to put in my name or parcel number. | ||
| Is there something like that for IRS? | ||
| I know it's a dumb question, but when I have to pay them and I send them my check, I really never know. | ||
| Did they receive it? | ||
| Was it applied to my account? | ||
| Is there an online account for taxpayers that we can go into and look and see from year to year? | ||
| And my second quick question, if you have time, is why does Congress change the tax code so often? | ||
| There are so many lawyers working for Congress people, and it seems like they purposely make it complicated. | ||
| I'll listen off the air. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So that's a great question. | ||
| It's not a dumb question. | ||
| And if you'd asked it five to seven years ago, the answer would have been no, there's no online account. | ||
| But the IRS has been building an online account, and that's some of what it's been using for the Inflation Reduction Act money to make it more robust. | ||
| You have to pass, you have to have an ID.me identity authentication, and then you can create an online account. | ||
| So if you go onto the IRS website and you look for online account, you can go through the process of creating an ID.me account and then get your online account, which will show you what's going on with your returns and some of your history. | ||
| And each year they've been planning to add more features to it so that you'd be really able to do so much more on the online account. | ||
| And also personalized information, like if you're in a small business and your business code is X, like you raise dogs or something, then if there was some guidance that came out relating to dog breeding, they would be able to send you information about that and that'd be in your account. | ||
| Congress making the law complex. | ||
| Well, you know, I used to say, you know, we've seen the special interests and the special interests are us. | ||
| You know, we all want our particular situation to be recognized in the Internal Revenue Code. | ||
| And the more special provisions you have, the more complex it becomes and the more likely it is for someone to make a mistake. | ||
| So it's a challenge. | ||
| You know, it would be lovely to have comprehensive tax reform, but it requires some political will and it's a long process to get there. | ||
| We're going to have to have it because at some point the code becomes so complex that it's just impossible to navigate. | ||
| The caller asking about online services, something you mentioned, efforts to modernize. | ||
| What could we see out of Doge efforts possibly because we are cutting down on a human staff? | ||
|
unidentified
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So, you know, I think that Doge could be helpful if they took a pause themselves instead of coming in and was sweeping and stopping everything and just learned from the existing IRS employees what they're trying to do, what initiatives they have underway, and actually talked about, you know, learned what activities the IRS is doing to identify returns that have risk factors in them. | |
| And then using the expertise of the Doge employees, bringing in, you know, learning from them what's being done in the private sector and other sectors that the IRS could benefit from. | ||
| So, you know, there's an orderly process that can be done without destroying the organization and making the IRS employees feel like they are worthless. | ||
| They are human beings who are trying to do the best they can with the resources that they have. | ||
| I'll try to get in. | ||
| One more call for you, James, in Philadelphia, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Hi, James. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi. | |
| So I'm a retired IRS employee one year now. | ||
| And so Nina Olson is well known as the advocate, well, at least she was at that time. | ||
| And often as an employee, you thought you had done everything right. | ||
| And then you'd be contacted by the advocate service who had been contacted by the taxpayer. | ||
| And it was sometimes seen as adversarial because, of course, as an employee, as a good employee, you thought you had done everything right. | ||
| So the one case I want to talk about, and the IRS brings in money. | ||
| So I was working for a section that worked with international taxpayers. | ||
| And there was a case where we found a whistleblower came forward from a Swiss bank. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Have you ever heard of the joke, would you go to jail for a couple days if a couple years, I mean, if someone was going to give you over $100 million? | ||
| And most people would say, well, yeah, I'd probably take that deal. | ||
| Well, that's what happened with the Swiss Bank whistleblower. | ||
| And because of that case, I know recently, this goes back 10 years, but recently, I guess because more whistleblowers have come forward with Swiss Bank people with money over there, that project alone has collected $16.5 billion. | ||
| So Mr. Birkenfeld got $104 million, which I think was 20%. | ||
| Can I just say one more thing about whistleblowers? | ||
| So maybe because we were working on a project, that project, one day, our group had been given boxes of letters from supposed whistleblowers. | ||
| And we were asked to go through this material to find what was going on. | ||
| And a lot of it was ex-spouses, neighbors living across the stream. | ||
| My neighbors got a new boat. | ||
| Our managers just shut it down right away. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because one of the things you brought up is unauthorized people looking at material that you're not entitled to look at. | ||
| So in other words, we didn't want to go on a phishing project just based on word of mouth and find, you know, and put people through the turmoil that a letter from the taxpayer from the IRS puts people through. | ||
| And I do. | ||
| I appreciate all the cases that I worked on and that we worked on. | ||
| We brought in a lot of money, and the IRS brings money to the government. | ||
| It doesn't lose money. | ||
| We bring the money to the government so it can continue to run. | ||
| James, we'll have to end it there. | ||
| We'll get a response from Nina. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I mean, you just said it really well. | |
| The IRS is the accounts receivable function for the federal government. | ||
| And the work that you're doing is some of the most, or that you are doing, is some of the most sophisticated work that is being done around the world. | ||
| And it is very difficult. | ||
| And your point about not doing phishing expeditions, you handled this excellently. | ||
| You know, that shows the ethics that the IRS employees have. | ||
| I will say that it is difficult sometimes when you get a case in the Taxpayer Advocate Service because we are supposed to be the voice of the taxpayer inside the IRS. | ||
| And it means that you're reaching out to an IRS employee who believes that they've done everything right. | ||
| And they may in the end, it may be that we see that they have done everything right. | ||
| But our job is to actually raise the taxpayers' points and make our own, well, I'm saying our own, make their own independent assessment about whether the taxpayer is right or whether the IRS is right. | ||
| And then if we believe the IRS is right, then we have to explain that to the taxpayer. | ||
| And I will make one point. | ||
| One of the things when I was the taxpayer, National Taxpayer Advocate, that I looked at, we would do customer satisfaction surveys of our taxpayers that brought cases into the taxpayer advocate service. | ||
| And overall, first of all, 80% of the cases from year to year that came into TAS received the relief that the taxpayer was asking when they came in. | ||
| So clearly, in the vast majority of cases, we were able to bring about some kind of relief that the taxpayer was asking for. | ||
| But the other thing was, where we couldn't get relief, where we couldn't give the taxpayer what they were asking, we ask in our customer satisfaction surveys, do you feel better about the IRS as a whole as a result of your interaction with the Taxpayer Advocate Service? | ||
| And in over a third of the cases, those taxpayers said yes, which I always thought was a remarkable result that these are taxpayers who didn't get what they came in for, but because of the process of us reaching out to the IRS employee and finding out what was going on and then being able to explain to the taxpayer, it created greater faith in the IRS as a whole. | ||
| And that's an important thing that you don't want to lose sight of that will be eroded as cuts occur in the IRS and particularly in the Taxpayer Advocate Service, the safety net for the IRS. | ||
| Our guest, Nina Olson, Executive Director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights. | ||
| Nina, thank you so much for being with us today. | ||
|
unidentified
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Live today on the C-SPAN Networks. | |
| At 10 a.m. Eastern, the House meets for morning speeches and at 12 p.m. for legislative business. | ||
| Members will consider a bill to establish new foreign gift and contract disclosure requirements for colleges and universities and also work on legislation related to energy conservation standards for walk-in coolers and freezers. | ||
| On C-SPAN 2 at 10 a.m., the Senate returns to resume consideration of the nomination of Michael Krazios to be the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. |