The U.S. Senate last week confirmed the Trump Administration’s new IRS Commissioner, for U.S. Rep. Billy Long. Unfortunately nothing in Long’s record suggests he’s up to the task of rebuilding the IRS’s credibility with the American public.
The IRS has lost its way and needs a major rebuild. I’ve been a tax professional for more than 35 years and the performance of the IRS has fallen through the floor. And Commissioner Long, a 69 year-old, six term ex-Congressman from Missouri, is a former auctioneer with no accounting or tax training and no experience managing or turning around a large organization.
That’s not a recipe for improvement of an agency that’s become a living embodiment of bureaucratic delay, ineptitude, and bullying.
The IRS has a special burden of performance among all government agencies. It’s one of the only government agencies that almost all Americans must deal with. It has the fearsome power to investigate tax matters, demand documents for its examination, and seize assets from taxpayers it feels are not in compliance with its regulations.
If the IRS fails to maintain the highest levels of accessibility, responsiveness, and transparency, it risks creating a major rupture between Americans and their federal government. Without those performance standards, particularly where citizens’ earnings and assets are concerned, the IRS’s actions can start to feel oppressive and even tyrannical.
And today’s IRS is falling farther and farther off meeting necessary performance requirements for a department that plays such a critical role in American society. I’ll cite a personal story to illustrate, but it’s an example that is representative of what I’ve been seeing happen to clients and other taxpayers across the country.
In July of 2024 I had to file an amendment to my 2023 tax return to add an investment loss that wasn’t included on my original tax return. It wasn’t an insignificant change, but filing an amended return is very common as more than four million other Americans need to do it each year.
When I filed the amendment, the IRS website said processing time was 16 to 20 weeks. That would have put an expected response, generously, by January of this year. It’s now coming up on a year since I filed it the amendment. Still no action on it.
This kind of negligent non-response from the IRS has become ridiculously common. The AP reported that the backlog of unprocessed amended returns had swelled to almost two million in early 2024. I’ll hazard a guess the number is bigger now – and what had been 16 to 20 weeks for processing has now ballooned as a result of the agency’s incompetence.
I called the IRS to try to figure out what’s going on. They found my return. Somehow it had been routed to the agency’s international desk even though the amendment I filed was for a domestic investment – and even though the only international item on my entire original return was a $42 foreign tax credit from some Exxon Mobil stock. For that, I guess, they assigned the return to IRS’s International Department. I’ve been calling about the return every month since March. “It’s still in processing,” is al they’ll say.
The IRS has had attrition and a big exodus from a DOGE voluntary retirement program. But given the government’s voracious appetite for revenue, the IRS simply must effectively carry out its tax determination and tax collection functions. And it simply isn’t.
The IRS holds Americans to all kinds of deadlines and standards – with penalties, with interest, with threats and liens and levies. They can close and lock a business’s doors. They can disrupt a law-abiding citizen’s life.
And in return, they have little to no accountability whatsoever to the American taxpayer.
The current magnitude of IRS service problems started to appear during the COVID mess. Not surprisingly, operational standards and discipline seemed to collapse as IRS personnel began working from home. Agency employees were allowed to stay away from the office during the entire Biden Administration, and were only forced to start returning after President Trump ordered them back earlier this year – a decision the IRS employee union continues to fight.
The IRS needs response deadlines to taxpayers that are just as strict as the ones it imposes on those same taxpayers. That’s why Congress and the White House need to rip the figurative IRS house down to the studs and give the agency the resources it needs to rebuild.
Agency reformers must be given every budgetary dollar they need to do this job efficiently. The IRS needs to do its work with better technology (including aggressive deployment of AI), and fewer but better trained agents who are in their offices five workdays a week.
For new Commissioner Long to succeed, he must make the IRS accountable for performance. That will require:
· Actively enforced performance standards for IRS employees.
· More frequent, automated communication with taxpayers regarding the status of matters they have before the agency.
· Return processing benchmarks with strict deadlines that IRS employees must keep, accompanied by penalties for delays, incentives for work completed sooner, and termination for employees that repeatedly cause delays or fail to meet efficiency standards.
· The negation of penalties on taxpayers if the IRS’s work on their returns is delayed beyond prescribed deadlines. Interest owed by the taxpayer should also be cancelled if the agency delays the processing of their return.
· Better tracking and logging software for email communications between taxpayers and the agency, and expansion of the current system which allows tax practitioners to email IRS personnel through secure portal.
In the end, a George H.W. Bush administration-era IRS mission statement needs to be restored and followed: “To collect the proper amount of tax revenue, at the least cost to the public, and in a manner that warrants the highest degree of public confidence in our integrity, efficiency and fairness.”
Frankly, it’s not clear what the Trump Administration sees in Commissioner Long that makes him the right person for this job. Unfortunately, that means there’s not a lot of reason for current optimism that these reforms will happen soon.
