The Internal Revenue Service is facing not only a budget crunch this tax season, but also rampant identity theft.
IRS commissioner John Koskinen recently issued warnings about the impact of years of successive budget cuts on the agency’s ability to help taxpayers and tax preparers answer questions this tax season, while cautioning that tax returns filed on paper are likely to experience longer delays than usual this year…
Jay Weill, a partner at the law firm Sideman & Bancroft and former chief of the Tax Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco, thinks the IRS budget cuts at the hands of Congress are a big mistake.
“I do a lot of criminal tax work and the IRS Criminal Investigation agents predict that within a year, after attrition and retirements, there will only be about 1,600 IRS special agents, and of those special agents 300 or 400 of them are reviewers and supervisors,” he said in an interview last week. “So maybe there will be 1,100 or 1,200 people whose sole job is to investigate criminal tax cases throughout the United States. They’re going to have to do a lot more with a lot less.”
