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Monday, July 1, 2024

National Taxpayer Advocate Delivers Report To Congress: 500,000 Identity Theft Case Backlog Takes 2 Years To Resolve, IRS Answers 31% Of Taxpayer Phone Calls

IR-2024-173 (June 26, 2024), National Taxpayer Advocate Issues Mid-Year Report to Congress; Highlights Filing Season Challenges and Focuses on Strategic Priorities:

Report to CongressNational Taxpayer Advocate Erin M. Collins today released her statutorily mandated mid-year report to Congress. The report says the tax-return filing season generally ran smoothly this year, but it identifies delays in issuing refunds to identity theft victims, misleading telephone measures that lead to poor resource allocation decisions, and delays in processing Employee Retention Credit claims as key taxpayer challenges. The report also emphasizes the importance of technology upgrades as the IRS seeks to modernize its operations in the coming years.

New York Times, Rampant Identity Theft Is Taxing the I.R.S.:

Rampant identity theft has overwhelmed the Internal Revenue Service, resulting in a backlog of 500,000 unresolved fraud cases, leaving taxpayers without refunds and credits that they are due, the agency’s watchdog wrote in a report to Congress on Wednesday.

The report by the National Taxpayer Advocate described the slow pace of addressing the identity theft cases as a “blemish” on the performance of the I.R.S., which is in the midst of a sweeping modernization campaign that aims to improve taxpayer services. While the I.R.S. was criticized by the watchdog for identify theft delays last year, the backlog has gotten only worse.

The I.R.S. is taking nearly two years to resolve identity theft victims’ assistance cases and has an inventory of approximately 500,000 cases, up from 484,000 cases in September.

“I.R.S. delays in resolving identity theft victim assistance cases are unconscionable,” Erin Collins, the taxpayer advocate, wrote in the report.

Wall Street Journal, Millions of Taxpayers Call the IRS for Help. Two-Thirds Don’t Reach Anyone.:

Anyone who has called the Internal Revenue Service knows it can be frustrating to get help. Taxpayers successfully reached a human about 31% of the time this tax season, according to the agency’s own taxpayer advocate.

Despite this, the IRS rated its service a score of 88%, up from a dismal 4% during the lows of the pandemic, when getting help at the agency was like winning the lottery. Erin Collins, head of the IRS’s Taxpayer Advocate Service, said Wednesday that while the improvement is notable, these high marks are nothing to brag about.

The IRS rating covers just 35 of its 102 customer-service numbers and doesn’t count the many callers who hang up in frustration or get sent to recorded messages, said Collins in her midyear report to Congress.

For the 2.1 million people who called the agency’s collections phone line, for instance, less than one-fifth reached a representative, with an average hold time of about 10 minutes, according to Collins’s report. There is also no information on what happens after the representative answers the phone or how often taxpayers’ issues are resolved. 

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https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2024/07/national-taxpayer-advocate-report-to-congress-identity-theft-backlog-irs-answers-only-31-percent-of-phone-calls.html

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