Robert L. Sommers, all rights reserved. Spurred on by the media parade of IRS horror stories, Congress has enacted significant reforms for those ensnared by the IRS bureaucracy at the audit and collection levels.
Taxpayers have new procedural rights and some of the more egregious abuses have been eliminated.
Also, IRS personnel are often over-worked, poorly trained in tax law, and are often more concerned with scoring points within the bureaucracy than providing fair and impartial administration of our tax laws. And the situation appears to be getting worse. Congress passes this legislation without measuring the enforcement impact on IRS, and then it fails to provide the funds necessary to educate IRS agents regarding the changes. At the audit level, if there are sophisticated legal issues presented, the auditor is often clueless as to the law. Traditionally, taxpayers could rely on IRS Appeals to rectify the situation, but the level of tax expertise at appeals has also dwindled.