Saturday, January 7th, 2017 @ 11:22PM

TREASURY INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR TAX ADMINISTRATION Analysis of Resources Allocated to Taxpayer Services 

CFEG reports that the Treasury Inspector General For Tax Administration (TIGTA) released a report titled, “Analysis of Resources Allocated to Taxpayer Service” on January 5, 2017. The full report may be reviewed by clicking the link below.  CFEG will summarize highlight TIGTA’s findings. In this report TIGTA performed an analysis to address congressional inquiries regarding the IRS’s allocation of resources to taxpayer services. TIGTA noted in its report that the IRS pointed to budgetary constraints as the cause for reducing its taxpayer service activities, including its telephone assistance, in FY 2015. However, based on TIGTA’s analysis the IRS had sufficient funds out of the Taxpayer Services appropriation, which had increased by $198 million, and $421 million available in user fee receipts in FY 2015 for taxpayer service activities.

TIGTA found that the amount of the IRS’s Taxpayer Services appropriation increased $198 million from FY 2013 to FY 2016. However, the amount of user fee receipts that the IRS used to supplement its annual Taxpayer Services appropriation was only about $40 million of the total $421 million user fee receipts in FY 2015. This $40 million represented a 79 percent decrease since FY 2013. TIGTA found that the IRS increased this amount to $99.6 million in FY 2016. IRS management noted that they increased the amount of user fees used to supplement the annual Operations Support appropriation in FY 2015 because appropriated funds for Operations Support were reduced in the last several fiscal years despite funding needs to implement legislative obligations.

TIGTA found that the overall number of resources allocated by IRS executives to work taxpayer correspondence and provide telephone assistance steadily decreased from FY 2013 to FY 2015. The overall staff hours allocated by IRS executives to answer telephone calls from taxpayers and work taxpayer correspondence decreased by approximately 11 percent between FYs 2013 and 2015. During this period, the IRS also used a higher percentage of resources to work correspondence which contributed to a lower level of telephone assistance. For example, of the total full-time equivalents allocated, the percentage used to work correspondence increased from 47.6 percent in FY 2013 to 52.4 percent in FY 2015 which, in turn, resulted in fewer full-time equivalents available to answer telephones. In other words, there were fewer hours worked by assistors to answer calls form taxpayers.

While TIGTA noted that IRS officials stated that using employees to work correspondence and setting a sharply lower level of telephone assistance goal were to address the significant aging of taxpayer correspondence, TIGTA’s analysis of correspondence inventory at the beginning of FY 2015 did not support the justification for using a higher percentage of staff to work correspondence.

https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2017reports/201740013fr.pdf

Posted by cfegov
Categories: Fraud, Waste and Abuse