Oh, I know this pisses off the GOP something fierce.

But, then, again, they seem to have decided that logic no longer applies to their rhetoric.

Well, here are the facts.  It turns out that once funding of the IRS was returned (the GOP has been slashing IRS funding for more than a decade), life for you and me (that’s me as a tax professional and you as a taxpayer) got significantly better.  This funding was provided by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed 16 August 2022.  But, the key point is the IRS immediately glommed onto that funding and permission to make our lives easier!

It’s just that darned simple.

You don’t believe me?  LEt’s review the real situation.

This past tax season the IRS was able to answer 3 million more phone calls.  That’s 28000 more a day!

And along those same lines, instead of being placed on hold for 28 minutes (of which a significant number of us would get disconnected), the wait time was cut to three minutes.  Now, let me also explain that if you are tax professional, the wait time (because we ask more detailed- and often client related- questions) has dropped from hours to some 20 or 30 minutes.  And, the IRS asks us to enter our phone number and they will call us back, so we don’t sit there twiddling our thumbs (or billing our clients for that telephone wait time.

Here’s a statistic that blew me away.  It’s now possible for a taxpayer to be served in person- about 140K more this year than last year.  That’s because some 35 Taxpayer Assistance Centers were opened or reopened.

Here’s one I expect for which you will stand up and clap.   The entire backlog of 2022 returns were cleared without error.  Not the millions that were not processed like in previous years.

And, now when we file an amended tax return, taxpayers don’t have to wait for a check- they can receive their funds via direct deposit.

The IRS is making it easier for many of the queries they send taxpayers to be responded by clicking a form, saving time and reducing errors.

This last statistic is not really something the IRS did- but how they reacted to what they were provided.  And, that’s there were 80X more digital returns this year when compared to last year.

The improvements are possible thanks to funding provided under the Inflation Reduction Act, and the IRS deserves credit for accomplishing so much in so little time. The IRA was passed on August 16, 2022.