Conservatives are angry that the more than $1 trillion CRomnibus legislation recently passed. There are many good reasons for that, however, there are some tactical methods underway as a result of the legislation most of all the Internal Revenue Service.
Since the IRS targeting program broke, certain measures have been taken most of which includes lawsuits to gain access to the no longer missing emails and communications of those colluding against conservative organizations.
Inside the CRomnibus was a deep cut to the IRS budget. Yippee, or not so fast. These conditions may delay income tax returns processing and the same applies to refunds.
The War On The IRS: Congress Cuts Its Funding To Lowest Level Since 1998
House GOP Appropriators bragged that this year’s IRS budget is the lowest since 2008. But it is actually worse than that. In inflation adjusted dollars, the agency’s funding is lower than it has been since 1998, when Buffy was still slaying vampires and people were listening to Aerosmith before it was nostalgic.
For context, in 1998, taxpayers filed about 125 million individual returns. Last year, the agency had to process 145 million.
Technology has made some of that work easier—more than 90 percent of individual returns are now filed electronically, vastly reducing the amount of work for IRS staffers. But technology has also forced the agency to respond to growing numbers of hackers and identity thieves.
And while processing returns may be easier, taxpayers must sort through increasingly complex rules—most as result of laws passed by the same Congress that cuts the IRS budget. The agency ought to be providing more assistance and education to help them but, thanks to those budget reductions, it is providing less.
According to the Government Accountability Office, IRS has cut staff by 9 percent since 2009. Examinations of business returns dropped from 50 percent to one-third. In 2014, callers waited twice as long for an IRS response than they did in 2009, and fewer said they received service. The IRS has cut training costs by more than 80 percent. The agency estimates its audit rate for partnerships and other pass-through business–where fraud and error are rampant– was 0.5 percent in 2011.
Now the IRS faces the unenviable task of trying to track who has health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, and calculate penalties for those who do not. Worse, it must sort out whether people received the right subsidies, and, if they did not, it must correct them.
Many tax administration experts have long feared the agency will be unable to get this right. And lower funding will make the task even more difficult. That, of course, is exactly what many anti-ACA lawmakers have in mind.
The IRS Commissioner is telegraphing a warning about the IRS. A possible shutdown is forecasted. Then a hiring freeze has been invoked.
“Our hiring — already limited at a ratio of one hire for every five people who leave — will be frozen with only a few mission-critical exceptions,” he wrote in an email to employees. “We will stop overtime except in critical situations.”
But there’s potentially more to come, as IRS leadership decides what else to cut over the next nine months of the fiscal 2015 budget, he warned. Koskinen also said IRS leadership is “consulting with the leadership of the NTEU” — referring to the National Treasury Employees Union, meaning the cuts in some way could affect employees.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/irs-budget-cuts-113651.html#ixzz3MHlLxtg0
