WASHINGTON
— National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson today released her statutorily
mandated mid-year report to Congress that identifies the priority issues the
Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS) will address during the upcoming fiscal year.
The report emphasizes the importance of taking concrete steps to give meaning
to the recently adopted Taxpayer Bill of Rights, issuing refunds to victims of
return preparer fraud, continuing to make improvements in the Exempt
Organizations area, and expanding the recently announced voluntary return
preparer certification program to include competency testing.
The
report praises the IRS for implementing the Advocate’s longstanding
recommendation to adopt a Taxpayer Bill of Rights. In addition, “the IRS ran a
generally successful filing season (although taxpayer services were sub-optimal
largely due to staffing limitations), instituted a more equitable approach to
its Offshore Voluntary Disclosure initiative, and introduced a voluntary system
for educating unenrolled return preparers,” Olson wrote in a preface to the
report. “All this is generally good news. But as we note in the report, the
good news also raises additional questions and concerns.”
Taxpayer
Bill of Rights
On June
10, 2014, the IRS adopted a Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TBOR), a list of 10 rights that the
National Taxpayer Advocate has long recommended to help taxpayers and IRS
employees alike gain a better understanding of the dozens of discrete taxpayer
rights scattered throughout the multi-million word Internal Revenue Code.
A
taxpayer survey conducted for the Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS) in 2012 found
that fewer than half of U.S. taxpayers believe they have rights before the IRS,
and only 11 percent said they know what those rights are.
“Taxpayer
knowledge and education is the best taxpayer protection there is,” the report
says. “A comprehensive public outreach campaign is crucial to overcome
taxpayers’ lack of knowledge about their rights and inform them that the IRS
has adopted a TBOR. These initiatives will require a variety of communication
plans and tools, all with the goal of making taxpayer rights a part of every
IRS communication with the taxpayer..”
The IRS
has already incorporated the TBOR into a revamped version of Publication 1, Your Rights as a Taxpayer,
which is the main vehicle for explaining taxpayer rights to taxpayers. The IRS
has also created special sections on its public website and its internal
website to highlight the 10 taxpayer rights. In addition, TAS has created a webpage that links existing statutory and administrative
remedies to each of the ten rights..
The TBOR,
Olson wrote, “has the potential to be an important milestone in tax administration.”
She notes that some commentators have questioned the significance of a TBOR,
given the lack of enforcement mechanisms. In response, she says that one
benefit of articulating taxpayer rights clearly is that doing so will bring
into focus areas where there are gaps between rights and remedies, notably with
respect to the right to quality service.
“TAS will
be very active in FY 2015 and years to come in advocating for and working with
Congress and the IRS to fill those gaps, and educating taxpayers about those
rights,” Olson wrote. “This activity is central to our mission.”
IRS
Treatment of Victims of Return Preparer Fraud
At the
same time that hundreds of thousands of taxpayers have become victims of
tax-related identify theft, a much smaller number of taxpayers have been
victimized by unscrupulous preparers who have stolen their refunds by fraudulently
altering information on their returns. The IRS has been working hard to issue
refunds to identity-theft victims quickly. By contrast, it has generally
declined to issue refunds to victims of preparer fraud at all.
“As I
discuss in the Area of Focus, Return
Preparer Fraud: A Sad Story,” Olson writes, “the IRS has
consistently dragged its heels, making one excuse after another, because
providing relief to these victims just is not a high enough priority, or more
disturbingly, because the IRS simply does not want to provide relief.”
In a
typical preparer fraud case, a taxpayer visits a preparer to have his or her
(or a joint) return prepared. The preparer completes the return. The taxpayer
reviews it, authorizes the preparer to e-file it, and often pays the preparer’s
fee. After the taxpayer leaves, the preparer alters the return, often by
changing the bank account routing number so the refund is transmitted to the
preparer’s own account.
Olson has
covered this subject in three of her Annual Reports to Congress, issued two
proposed Taxpayer Advocate Directives and two final Taxpayer Advocate
Directives, and elevated 25 Taxpayer Assistance Orders involving specific cases
to IRS Commissioners (both appointed and acting). Between 2000 and 2011, the
IRS Office of Chief Counsel issued four opinions and other guidance that, read
together, authorize the IRS to issue replacement refunds to victims of return
preparer fraud. However, no refunds have been issued. The report states that
some taxpayers have been waiting since the filing of their 2008 tax
returns. “Nowhere has the IRS failed to abide by the [recently announced
Taxpayer Bill of Rights] more than with respect to the issue of return preparer
refund fraud,” Olson wrote.
The
report states that IRS Commissioner John A. Koskinen decided on March 14 that
the IRS will issue refunds to victims of preparer fraud who have filed police
reports with the appropriate law enforcement agencies and met certain other
substantiation requirements. To date, the IRS has not implemented the decision,
saying it must first resolve certain accounting issues and declining to provide
a date certain by which it will issue the refunds.
Exempt
Organization Issues
The
report contains a detailed discussion of several issues relating to Exempt
Organizations (EOs).
In 2013,
the National Taxpayer Advocate delivered her mid-year Objectives Report to
Congress the month after the disclosure that the EO unit was using questionable
criteria to screen applicants for tax-exempt status. The Advocate’s report
contained a separate volume, Special
Report: Political Activity and the Rights of Applicants for Tax-Exempt Status,
that took a broad look at factors that contributed to the use of the
questionable screening criteria and associated processing delays and offered 16
recommendations to address them.
The
report released today provides a status update on those recommendations.
In this
report, the Advocate outlines a proposal that could provide a clearer test to
determine whether an organization seeking exempt status under IRC
§ 501(c)(4) is operating “primarily” for social welfare purposes. There is
currently very little guidance to help make that determination. Among other
unresolved issues, one could focus on the percentage of the entity’s
expenditures, the percentage of the entity’s time allocations, the percentage
of the entity’s advertisements, or other factors.
The
report says that an analogous issue arises for organizations seeking exempt
status under IRC § 501(c)(3), because if they engage in lobbying activity,
the amount of lobbying must be “insubstantial.”
To
provide (c)(3) organizations with a bright-line option, Congress enacted IRC
§ 501(h), which allows them to use a numeric test that focuses solely on
expenditures. The same option could be made available to organizations applying
under IRC § 501(c)(4).
“The
National Taxpayer Advocate believes organizations requesting the right to
receive contributions exempt from tax should be evaluated on how they expend
those contributions,” the report says. “Under this analysis, as with the 501(h)
election, volunteer time and activity, which do not generate taxable income for
which tax exemption would be available in the first instance, are irrelevant to
this determination.” The National Taxpayer Advocate plans to refine this
proposal and include a legislative recommendation in her year-end report to
Congress.
The
report also expresses concern about the IRS’s recently announced decision to
adopt a new EO application, Form 1023-EZ. Although the Advocate previously
recommended development of a simplified Form 1023-EZ, she objects to the new
form because it does not require organizations to describe their mission and
activities or send in their formation documents for review.
TAS will
attempt to monitor the effects of the streamlined standards and recommend
modifications as needed.
Minimum
Standards for Tax-Return Preparers
In 2002,
the National Taxpayer Advocate began recommending that Congress authorize the
IRS to establish minimum standards for tax return preparers. In the absence of
congressional action, the IRS in 2010 began to implement preparer standards on
its own. Earlier this year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia affirmed a lower court decision concluding that the IRS exceeded its
rulemaking authority in acting without a statutory grant of authority. Last
month, the IRS announced that lacking the authority to continue its mandatory
credentialing program, it will implement a voluntary program for the upcoming
2015 filing season.
The
report argues that minimum standards for return preparers are important to
protect taxpayers from incompetent or unscrupulous preparers. More than 140
million individual taxpayers each year file tax returns, and well over half use
return preparers. Yet there are currently no standards for hanging out a
shingle and preparing returns, and there is considerable evidence that many
preparers lack the knowledge and ability to prepare accurate tax returns.
Significantly,
more than 10 million taxpayers who claim the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)
use unregulated preparers to prepare their returns. Because these taxpayers are
low income, the report says they often turn to pawn shops, used car dealers,
and check-cashing outlets for return preparation assistance. Without meaningful
standards, Olson wrote, “we will continue to subject these low income taxpayers
to the actions of incompetent or unscrupulous preparers and we will be unlikely
to make progress in reducing the EITC noncompliance rate to an acceptable
level, thus harming the public fisc.”
Olson
reiterates her longstanding recommendation that a meaningful preparer standards
program must contain four components: (1) registration to promote
accountability; (2) a one-time “entrance” examination to ensure basic
competency in return preparation; (3) continuing education courses to
ensure preparers keep up to date with the many frequent tax-law changes; and
(4) a taxpayer education campaign to help guide taxpayers to credentialed
practitioners (i.e.,
CPAs, attorneys, and Enrolled Agents) or preparers who have satisfied the above
requirements.
The
report recommends that Congress pass legislation authorizing the IRS to
reinstitute the program it had implemented prior to the U.S. Court of Appeals
decision.
Focusing
on the 2015 filing season, Olson praised the IRS for adopting a voluntary
program that encourages preparers to take continuing education courses. Looking
forward, she recommends that the IRS also develop a minimum competency exam as
a part of its voluntary program, arguing that the inclusion of individuals who
cannot pass a minimum competency exam in a publicly searchable IRS database may
confuse or even mislead taxpayer-consumers.
Other
Issues Covered in Report
The
National Taxpayer Advocate’s FY 2015 Objectives Report to Congress also
identifies 10 other areas of focus for the upcoming year, reviews the 2014
filing season, describes TAS’s efforts to improve its advocacy for and service
to taxpayers, summarizes pending TAS research initiatives, and provides an
update on TAS’s efforts to implement an integrated technology system.
Volume 2
of the report contains the IRS’s responses to the administrative
recommendations the National Taxpayer Advocate made in her 2013 annual report
to Congress, along with additional TAS comments. Overall, the report made 113
administrative recommendations. The IRS says it has implemented, is
implementing, or will implement 69 of the recommendations, although its
agreement to do so is contingent on resources in some cases.
*
*
*
* *
* *
The
National Taxpayer Advocate is required by statute to submit two annual reports
to the House Committee on Ways and Means and the Senate Committee on Finance.
The statute requires these reports to be submitted directly to the Committees
without any prior review or comment from the Commissioner of Internal Revenue,
the Secretary of the Treasury, the IRS Oversight Board, any other officer or
employee of the Department of the Treasury, or the Office of Management and
Budget. The first report is due on June 30 of each year and must identify the
objectives of the Office of the Taxpayer Advocate for the fiscal year beginning
in that calendar year. The second report, due on December 31 of each year, must
identify at least 20 of the most serious problems encountered by taxpayers,
discuss the ten tax issues most frequently litigated in the courts and make
administrative and legislative recommendations to resolve taxpayer problems.
ABOUT THE TAXPAYER ADVOCATE SERVICE
The
Taxpayer Advocate Service is an independent organization within the IRS. TAS
employees help taxpayers who are experiencing financial difficulties, such as
not being able to provide necessities like housing, transportation, or food;
taxpayers who are seeking help in resolving problems with the IRS; and
taxpayers who believe an IRS system or procedure is not working as it
should. If you believe you are eligible for TAS assistance, call 1-877–777–4778
(toll-free). For more information, go to TaxpayerAdvocate.irs.gov or irs.gov/advocate. You can get updates on tax topics at
facebook.com/YourVoiceAtIRS, Twitter.com/YourVoiceatIRS, and YouTube.com/TASNTA.
Related
Item:
No comments:
Post a Comment