IRS nightmare

If your boss needed you at a critical time, and she called you to elicit an important piece of information that only you knew, and you hung up on her, not once but a dozen times, what do you think might happen to your job?

Far-fetched?

Not when you realize that the Internal Revenue Service hung up on 8.8 million callers this past spring. This, of course, was the critical time when taxpayers needed assistance in completing their 2014 income tax returns. No heads rolled in bureaucratic land, and there were plenty of excuses.

In fact, while it was cutting customer service, the IRS spent $60 million on employee bonuses last year. The IRS also allows employees to spend nearly 500,000 hours annually working on union activities while being paid by us taxpayers. If this weren't so outrageously true, readers might believe I was making this up.

While it borders on the unfathomable, the IRS has been hanging up on us for years, but 2015's number was striking in the extreme. Compared with last year, this was an increase of about 1,518 percent.

In typical government fashion, it calls these hang-ups "courtesy disconnects," a euphemism for an overloaded system that hangs up on a caller when there's no one to answer the phone. One-third of the callers did get through, but they were on hold an average of 23 minutes, according to a report issued by National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson.

"Millions of taxpayers were unable to reach the IRS by phone; millions did not receive a timely response, if any, to their correspondence, and many more may have had to pay a tax preparer or professional for answers to tax law questions or for assistance they could previously have obtained from the IRS for free," wrote Olson, who leads an independent office within the IRS.

When callers did get a real person, they couldn't ask questions that required special knowledge or complexity. These were considered off limits, starting this year. Customer service agents could answer only basic tax questions.

Taxpayers trying to work with paper forms didn't fare much better. Libraries, post offices and local assistance centers didn't get their forms and publications until Feb. 28, almost halfway through the filing season. When the forms ran out, there were no more to order.

Olson described the 2015 filing season as a "Tale of Two Cities": If you didn't need to get involved with the IRS, the system served you fine. If you needed to deal with a human, it became a case of unending frustration. The "loss of trust" could lead some Americans to just stop paying their taxes, the Olson report warns.

IRS officials blamed the lousy performance on budget cuts and fewer personnel. "The IRS must carefully balance limited resources to meet its dual mission of providing taxpayer service and enforcing the tax laws," said IRS spokesperson Julianne Fisher Brietbeil. "The continuing cuts to our budget have severely hampered our ability to provide taxpayers with the services they need and deserve."

A staff report by House Ways and Means Committee Republicans was critical of the IRS's spending priorities. The report said the agency diverted $134 million in user fees that had been spent on customer service last year to other areas.

We deserve better, and we need to demand better performance by one of the most important agencies of government. Finger-pointing isn't going to cut it any more. We're demanding radical changes so we don't have to suffer through the same frustration again in the coming tax season. The IRS has made the term "customer service" an oxymoron.

BRUCE FRASSINELLI

tneditor@tnonline.com