some suggestions: burn it down and start over. abolish the income tax altogether. privatize it.
by 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 research
if the 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 busy season barometer were a thermometer, it would be popping its mercury with responses to “how would you fix the irs?”
see: irs tops list of busy season problems
we’re getting a lot of comments, many of them scorchingly hot. accountants and tax preparers are not happy with the government agency that their profession depends on more than any other.
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the top five most common recommendations:
- increase funding.
- hire more people.
- improve training.
- modernize technology
- stop sending notices until the mail backlog gets caught up.
the rusted nuts and bolts
there are suggestions that the irs be abolished and commissioner charles rettig fired (he’s quitting at the end of this year, anyway). or the income tax be abolished and congress fired (they’re not quitting, by the way.).
but most comments refer to the rusted nuts and bolts of an agency teetering on dysfunction.
michael schaffer, a managing director at bpm llp in san jose, calif., sums up the main and most common suggestions, all of which the irs itself agrees with:
- “first: get congress to provide appropriate levels of funding for both operations and infrastructure improvements.
- “second: massive hiring of both frontline taxpayer-facing personnel and examiners (revenue agents & tax auditors).
- “third: massive investment in infrastructure both for customer service and for basic processing and data management/retrieval.”
absolute shambles
the head of a certain colorado cpa firm wants to see a more radical overhaul.
“in my mind, the irs needs to start from the ground up with a complete overhaul of the entire organization,” he or she says. “until congress and the irs recognize the absolute shambles of the current irs, nothing will change. if we ran our firm as the irs is run, we would have had to close the doors long ago. the irs needs to be restructured to be run like any other business. the government needs to be taken out of the process.”
we’re receiving a significant number of fiery comments to that effect.
among them:
- “i would abolish it.”
- “turn over their function to private companies.”
- “scrap the agency and start fresh.”
- “fire all of them and start over.”
- “burn it down.”
- “shut it down!!!!!”
we’re also hearing cries of despair.
“i’m not sure that the irs can be ‘fixed,’” says rebecca zulager, head of her own firm in ft. wayne, ind.
“the irs can’t be fixed. the current labor pool will not support that,” says jeff toye, head of his own firm in essex, mass.
“honestly, i believe that the tax system in the us is so heinously broken it’s hard to imagine how to fix it,” says gina devine, head of her own firm in carrboro, n.c.
“i am not usually a negative person, but i am not sure it is possible to fix the irs due to the amount of money it would take,” says the head of a small firm in north dakota. “they need to upgrade technology. they need to find and hire competent people and thoroughly train them.”
other memorable bits of advice:
- “trash the letter beginning ‘take action!’ when attempts to contact the irs are futile.”
- “the irs should outsource the audits instead of collections. cpas have a much better understanding of the tax laws, and most of us could tell whether or not the tax return is accurate from the face. also, we know what clients/taxpayers think and what they believe is okay but is not.”
- “the service needs to be totally revamped, privatized, and made to function as a business arm.”
- “simplify the tax code. no reason why the tax code could not be reduced to 100 pages or less.”
- “replace the current income tax with a national sales tax.”