Representative Jason Smith has been working through IRS falsities in the Ways and Means Committee. What he is finding is not a pleasant answer to Americans.
ROI
Taxpayers are not receiving the return on investment promised by the billions of dollars taken to modernize the IRS and improve customer service through the Inflation Reduction Act. Expert witnesses testified at a Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee hearing that the IRS needs to prioritize helping taxpayers navigate their tax filings instead of pursuing unnecessary and invasive audits. Despite receiving billion s of dollars for IT modernization, the National Taxpayers Union recently gave the IRS a “D” grade on modernization. Instead of taking advantage of efficiencies offered by new technology, Democrats chose to allocate the majority of the $80 billion they gave to the IRS to hire agents to hit working families with audits. During the hearing, one major issue with the IRS’s modernization efforts became clear: the agency still operates on outdated legacy systems, including some that date back to 1959. This wastes time and resources and makes taxpayer data vulnerable to security risks.
Customer Service?
Even after Democrats dumped billions into the IRS to improve customer service, a lousy 31 percent of phone calls were answered by a live human during the last tax filing season. Instead of hiring tens of thousands of new agents to audit more workers, the IRS should be leveraging new technologies, like artificial intelligence, to drastically improve customer service at the agency. A witness testified that it would be relatively seamless for the IRS to start adopting these technologies.
Committee Democrats spent the hearing shouting unfounded fear about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) jeopardizing taxpayer privacy and data. Unfortunately, as Rep. Beth Van Duyne (TX-24) noted, Democrats did not show the same concern for actual politically motivated leaks of confidential taxpayer data by an IRS contractor disclosing Donald Trump’s tax information.
Not only were the American people misled about the cost of the Inflation Reduction Act, but the Biden-Harris Administration also misled taxpayers about improved customer service after spending billions of taxpayer dollars. The results have been dismal: less than 1 in 3 calls are answered by a live person, a far cry from former Secretary Janet Yellen’s promise that a live person would answer most calls. The low answer rate is an indictment of the Democrats’ failed approach that ultimately has done little to help taxpayers engage with the IRS. Trying to get around the actual answer, the former taxpayer advocate admitted that if you want to count all calls, then, no, the majority of callers do not get a live person.
Time will tell what comes of the IRS and the funds invested into it.
