The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents employees at the Internal Revenue Service, is warning Congress against the impact of proposed budget cuts on the agency’s ability to deal with taxpayers.
The administration’s proposed 2020 budget would cut funding for taxpayer services by nearly $90 million below the current level, even though it would likely reduce the phone level of service to 68 percent next year.
The IRS was hit with a series of budget cuts for several years in a row, but its funding rebounded last year after passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to help implement the new tax law. Prior to that, the agency had to cut the number of staff supporting taxpayer service activities by more than 8 percent, including customer service representatives, whose numbers dropped from 10,209 in 2010 to 9,209 in 2017. The level of telephone service fell from 74 percent of calls answered in 2010 to 38 percent in 2015, while average wait times also climbed.
In response to complaints about the plummeting number of calls answered, Congress provided targeted funding for two years that helped increase the level of telephone service to 80 percent in the 2018 filing season. But the proposed budget cuts could bring that percentage back down to 68 percent next year.
National Treasury Employees Union President Tony Reardon asked Congress to help the IRS recover from $845 million in budget cuts and the loss of 23,000 employees since 2010.
“NTEU strongly believes that only by providing the IRS with additional resources will the IRS be able to meet the rising workload, stabilize and strengthen tax compliance and customer service programs, and allow the Service to address the federal deficit in a serious and meaningful way,” he wrote in testimony provided to the House and Senate on Wednesday.
His union believes the administration’s proposal to give the IRS $11.4 billion in base funding in 2020 isn’t enough, especially because it would lead to further losses in frontline full-time employees.
The NTEU also pointed to the impact of budget cuts on the IRS’s enforcement efforts. The total number of revenue officers at the IRS has fallen nearly 40 percent from 2011 to 2017. According to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, the number of individual audits has plummeted 40 percent, while audit rates of large corporations has slid from 17.7 percent in 2011 to 7.9 percent in 2017.
The Trump administration’s proposed 2020 budget would cut funding for enforcement by nearly $154 million from the current level.
“Without sufficient staffing to effectively enforce the law, ensure compliance with tax responsibilities and combat fraud, our voluntary tax compliance system is at risk,” Reardon wrote. “With the complexity of tax administration and future workloads only expected to rise, the IRS will be under a great deal of pressure to improve customer service standards while simultaneously enforcing the nation’s tax laws.”
Reardon didn't directly testify before Congress, but IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig testified before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday (see
