Tax Administration: IRS's 2008 Filing Season Generally Successful Despite Challenges, although IRS Could Expand Enforcement during Returns Processing
Released: 2009-01-12T00:00:00

Letter

Scope and Methodology

To assess IRS’s 2008 filing season performance in the key filing season activities compared to goals and past performance, report on the effect of ESP, and highlight areas where IRS could expand use of MEA, we reviewed and analyzed IRS reports, testimonies, budget submissions, and other documents and data, including workload data, data related to IRS’s performance measures and goals, and data on taxpayer usage of services and other statistics such as the number of paid preparers; observed operations at IRS’s Atlanta, Georgia, paper submission processing center, the Atlanta call site, the Joint Operations Center (which manages IRS’s telephone services) in Atlanta, and IRS’s walk-in locations in Atlanta and Baltimore, Maryland, and selected these offices for a variety of reasons, including the location of key IRS managers, such as those responsible for telephone and walk-in site services; tested for statistically significant differences between annual performance measures based on IRS sample data; analyzed staffing data for paper and electronic filing, and telephone assistance; reviewed information from organizations, such as Keynote Systems, which evaluate Internet performance; interviewed representatives of some of the larger private and nonprofit organizations that prepare tax returns, such as H&R Block, and trade organizations that represent both individual paid preparers, tax preparation companies, and professional associations, including the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants; reviewed TIGTA reports and interviewed TIGTA officials about IRS’s performance and initiatives; interviewed IRS officials about current operations, performance relative to 2008 performance goals and prior filing season performance, trends, significant factors, and initiatives that affected or were intended to improve performance, monitoring, and oversight of paid tax preparers; reviewed IRS data on math errors, information on IRS’s process for identifying and correcting math errors, legislation providing IRS with math error authority; interviewed IRS officials, including those from the EITC office, about MEA; reviewed reports on MEA from the National Taxpayer Advocate (NTA) and TIGTA; and reviewed our prior reports and followed up on our recommendations made in those reports.

This report discusses numerous filing season performance measures and data that cover the quality, accessibility, and timeliness of IRS’s services. We assessed the reliability of data used in this report by (1) performing electronic testing of required data elements, (2) reviewing existing information about the data and the system that produced them, and (3) interviewing agency officials knowledgeable about the data. We determined that the data were sufficiently reliable for the purpose of this report. To the extent possible, we corroborated information from interviews with documentation and data and where not possible, we attribute the information to IRS officials. We reviewed IRS documentation, interviewed IRS officials about computer systems and data limitations, and compared those results to our standards of data reliability. Data limitations are discussed where appropriate. We conducted our work primarily at IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C., walk-in sites offices at Baltimore, Maryland, the Wage and Investment Division headquarters and walk-in sites in Atlanta, Georgia.

Background

IRS’s filing season is an enormous and critical undertaking and consists of two primary activities, processing well over 100 million individual income tax returns and refunds and providing millions of taxpayers with telephone, Web site, and face-to-face assistance. The following describes the processing of tax returns.

Most taxpayers file their individual income tax returns electronically, although millions still mail paper returns. Electronic filing is faster, which allows taxpayers to receive refunds faster, and is less prone to transcription and other errors, and provides IRS with significant cost savings.

Taxpayers below an income ceiling can access the Free File program offered through IRS’s Web site by a consortium of 19 tax preparation companies that offer free on-line tax preparation and filing services for qualifying taxpayers. IRS continues to develop and deliver a number of Business Systems Modernization programs, including releases of the Customer Account Data Engine (CADE). CADE is intended to eventually replace IRS’s antiquated Master File legacy processing system and facilitates faster refund processing and provides IRS with more up-to-date account information.

IRS provides a variety of taxpayer services, including the following.

IRS has toll-free assistance telephone lines which taxpayers can call with questions about tax law or their refunds. Depending on how taxpayers respond to menu choices, questions are answered by automated messages or calls are routed to telephone assistors located at 24 call sites around the country. IRS offers assistance through its Web site, including “Where’s My Refund?”, which enables taxpayers to use the Web site to determine whether the agency received their tax returns and processed their refunds. Taxpayers can also download forms, instructions, and publications, research their own tax law issues through Frequently Asked Questions or Tax Topics, and receive help with specific tax law questions and procedural questions via e-mail. IRS offers assistance at nearly 12,000 volunteer sites, which helps IRS serve traditionally underserved taxpayer segments, including elderly, low-income, and disabled taxpayers, and taxpayers with limited- English proficiency. Additionally, IRS has 401 walk-in sites where taxpayers can receive basic tax law and account assistance from IRS staff and have returns prepared if their annual income is $40,000 or less.

In addition to depending on IRS, taxpayers depend heavily on paid tax return preparers or commercial tax prepartion software during the filing season. Paid preparers are a critical part of the nation’s tax administration system because of the wide variety of assistance they offer taxpayers, including help understanding tax obligations, return preparation and electronic filing, and providing forms and publications. In 2007, 59 percent of individual taxpayers had their return prepared and filed by paid preparers and about 16 percent prepared their return using commercial tax preparation software.

Late tax law changes create filing season challenges for IRS. This can be particularly true if, like ESP, the changes are complex and significantly increase filing season workload (for a detailed description of IRS’s implementation of ESP, see app. II). ESP contained complex rules about eligibility, amount of the rebate, and filing requirements.

Over the years, the Congress granted IRS legal authority to cover 11 areas so that the agency could correct return errors during processing, including calculation errors and entries that are inconsistent or exceed statutory limits, without having to issue the taxpayer a statutory notice of deficiency (see app. III for further details on the MEA process and authorities). We have reported that prompt compliance checks such as these are important because as unpaid taxes age, the likelihood of collecting all or part of the amount owed decreases, due in part to continued accrual of interest and penalties on the outstanding federal taxes. MEA also provides a taxpayer service as it allows taxpayers to receive their refunds faster, corrects return errors before interest is accrued, and can avoid time consuming interaction with IRS while the error is being resolved.

MEA can also help ensure taxpayers receive the tax benefits for which they are eligible. For example, between tax years 2003 and 2006, using its MEA, IRS identified over 500,000 occurrences of taxpayers under-claiming the EITC with the result that an additional $130 million was provided to those claimants. Without MEA, most of these errors would not likely have been identified and thousands of low income taxpayers would likely have received less than they were entitled.

Because math error checks are automated and require little contact with taxpayers, they provide IRS with an enforcement tool that is low cost and less intrusive and burdensome to taxpayers than audits. By using its MEA, IRS reported preventing $460 million from reaching ineligible taxpayers in fiscal year 2006.

The NTA—who heads the program that helps resolve taxpayers’ tax problems with IRS and recommends changes to mitigate taxpayer problems—noted some concerns about IRS’s use of MEA in its 2006 report to Congress. NTA reported that, because MEA allows IRS to summarily assess the tax before a taxpayer has the opportunity to challenge the assessment, it should be used in specific and narrow circumstances. Because taxpayer rights are different under MEA, NTA expressed concern that math error notices did not provide enough detail for the recipient to understand what had occurred, their rights, and how they could request abatement. NTA also reported that IRS was using math error checks in some limited areas where it was not clear that IRS had the authority. In its response to the NTA’s 2006 report, IRS reported that it resolved the issues raised by NTA. While the NTA acknowledges that the IRS has made significant improvements to the math error notice process, it still notes that IRS could improve how it is administering MEA.

Despite the Increased Volume of Tax Returns Due to the Economic Stimulus, IRS’s Filing Season was Successful Compared to Previous Years’ with the Exception of Access to Telephone Assistance

As of September 12, 2008, IRS processed 150 million individual income tax returns, including almost 9 million ESP-only returns, and processed 105 million tax refunds totaling $246 billion. IRS processed 16 million Form 1040As on paper, a 92 percent increase from last filing season, largely due to ESP. According to IRS officials, this increase was especially burdensome not only because paper processing is more labor-intensive and expensive then electronic processing, but also because claimants made many errors on ESP-only returns, which IRS had to manually correct. As of September 12, IRS had processed 116 million stimulus payments totaling almost $94 billion.

As shown in table 1, the percentage of electronically filed returns is similar to last year’s when ESP-only returns are included. Excluding the almost 9 million ESP-only returns, most of which were filed on paper, the number of taxpayers who filed electronically increased from 59 percent to 62 percent of total returns.

The increase in electronic filing is due, in part, to the Free File program. The number of taxpayers who filed electronically through Free File increased 24 percent, after a 2 percent decline in participation last year, to 3.8 million. According to IRS officials, this increase is due to greater taxpayer awareness and enhanced marketing.

As of August 8, CADE posted 30.5 million returns, slightly exceeding IRS’s goal of 30 million and significantly up from the 11 million returns CADE posted as of last year. As we have previously reported, a major benefit of CADE is that direct deposit refunds are issued by CADE 1 to 5 business days faster than the current legacy system, and paper check refunds are issued 4 to 8 business days faster because CADE posts information daily. CADE also was successful in processing 24 million stimulus payments and contributed to IRS’s early distribution of some stimulus payments. ESP- only payments processed through CADE, rather than the legacy Master file, were issued up to 4 days earlier than the first scheduled disbursement date.

Despite the additional volume, IRS met or exceeded goals for seven out of eight of the processing measures (see app. IV for details). The one measure where performance was significantly below IRS’s goal and last year’s level was the refund error rate, i.e., the percentage of refunds with IRS-cause errors issued to taxpayers by IRS. According to IRS officials, this performance was due to a programming change and did not delay the processing of returns or refunds.

We have previously reported that IRS’s ability to maintain or improve taxpayer service will likely depend on its continued ability to find efficiencies, particularly through increased electronic filing. Consistent with this approach, IRS released the “Advancing E-File Study” in November 2008, which is the foundation for the agency’s strategy and planned actions to reach the congressionally-set goal of 80 percent of individual returns filed electronically.

In recent reports, we suggested two options for increasing electronic filing or reducing paper processing. One would be for Congress to mandate electronic filing by large paid tax return preparers. Currently, many returns prepared by preparers on computers are printed and mailed to IRS, which then have to be transcribed. Our other option is to require bar coding on paper returns that were prepared by taxpayers using commercial tax preparation software. Bar coding would eliminate IRS’s transcription costs and errors. IRS agreed to study this recommendation.

Paid preparers prepared over 81 million returns, which was 59 percent of all individual tax returns in the 2007 filing season. Because IRS has limited ability to identify paid preparers and match them with the returns they prepared, we recently reported that IRS has limited information about the accuracy of these returns and recommended that IRS develop a plan to require a single identification number for paid preparers, which could facilitate research on paid preparers’ influence on taxpayer compliance. IRS agreed to explore the use of a single identification number to enhance IRS’s ability to identify paid preparers.

Telephone Performance Was Substantially Lower Compared to Last Year’s Due to the High Volume of Stimulus-Related Calls, with the Greatest Downturn Beginning in Early May

Taxpayers’ access to IRS’s telephone assistors was substantially lower than last year’s because, according to IRS, it received an unprecedented number of calls primarily due to ESP-related questions. As table 2 shows, through June 30 of this year, IRS received over 118 million calls, more than double the total number of calls from last year. However, compared to last year, more than twice as many callers abandoned their calls and nearly 10 times as many were disconnected by IRS.

On the basis of its experience with the stimulus rebates in 2001 and 2003, IRS took steps to facilitate telephone service, including establishing a dedicated toll-free Rebate Hotline for callers with ESP-related questions in February. As of June 30, IRS answered 37 million calls made to its Rebate Hotline. However, the unprecedented call volume strained IRS telephone resources and contributed to a significant decline in the telephone level of service. Calls to IRS spiked in the first three weeks of May around the same time that the first rounds of stimulus checks were issued (see fig. 1). According to IRS officials, taxpayers’ confusion over when they would receive their payment, or how much they received contributed to the high call volume. During these weeks, the percentage of callers waiting for an assistor and getting through fell below 50 percent and subsequently did not surpass that mark.

The increased call volume also contributed to a decline in related performance indicators and measures. As previously noted, the number of callers who received busy signals or were disconnected from IRS increased as did the caller abandon rate. Further, as shown in table 3, the average speed of answer—the length of time taxpayers wait to get their calls answered—nearly doubled from last year.

In addition to the Rebate Hotline, service on other toll-free lines, such as tax law and account assistance, was affected as well. For example, IRS estimated that from early May, when IRS began issuing ESP payments, through the end of June about 30 percent of callers to other toll-free lines asked ESP-related questions in addition to their primary question. When the caller asked an ESP-related question, the assistor was instructed not to transfer the caller to the rebate hotline, but instead to answer the question. As a result, the level of service on some other telephone applications not related to the Rebate Hotline also declined this year, according to IRS officials.

Even with the increased volume of calls, the accuracy of the telephone assistors’ responses to tax law and account questions was comparable to the same time period last year and met IRS’s goals (see table 4). Since 2005, IRS has maintained a level of accuracy of about 90 percent.

During the course of our filing season work, we identified some opportunities to reduce ESP-related calls. On May 21, 2008, we sent a letter to the IRS Commissioner that suggested four options for his consideration. IRS implemented three of the four options. IRS re-ordered the Frequently Asked Questions page on IRS’s Web site to put the most common questions addressed by assistors first. IRS added text to the payment schedule page on its Web site and a message for telephone assistors that provided more detail as to when various types of taxpayers should expect to receive their refunds. IRS modified the Rebate Hotline script to include an automated “Most Frequently Asked Questions” (FAQs) option by adding the FAQs to the automated messaging in the call waiting queue. The option IRS did not implement was to expand outreach efforts in the press about the timing and calculation of stimulus payments. IRS officials concluded that this information might unintentionally create more calls. Although we believe that additional and more accurate outreach would have been useful for reducing public confusion, we acknowledge IRS’s position that many of the calls have required specific explanations that could not have been handled in mass public outreach.

IRS Provided Tools through its Web Site That Significantly Increased Use and Potentially Diverted Calls

IRS provided tools and information through its Web site on ESP and adjusted the information quickly. For example, on the day the legislation was passed, IRS posted information on IRS.gov with details about ESP. Within a month, IRS launched the Stimulus Payment Calculator. IRS also provided a “Where’s My Stimulus Payment?” feature, launched May 1, 2008 (see app. II for more details on ESP timeline).

These ESP-related features resulted in a dramatic increase in the volume of taxpayer visits, as shown in table 5; visits to IRS’s Web site increased 74 percent; however, if taxpayer visits to ESP-related features were excluded, visits were slightly down from last year.

Although difficult to quantify, considering the large number of visits to ESP-related features on IRS’s Web site, it is likely that ESP information and features on IRS.gov provided sufficient information to divert taxpayers’ questions from IRS’s Rebate Hotline.

One measure of the quality of IRS’s Web site is its ranking in the Keynote Systems top 40 government Web sites. During the 2008 filing season, IRS.gov ranked first or second in response time out of the top 40 government Web sites in the Keynote Government Index weekly ratings, compared to ranging between third and sixth place last filing season.

Taxpayer Usage Increased at Volunteer Sites, and although IRS is Making Limited Progress Assessing Quality, Tax Law Quality Declined at Walk-in Sites

Volunteer partners prepared 3.2 million returns, which is a 31 percent increase compared to last year, with virtually the same number of sites. IRS officials attribute this growth mainly to increased word-of-mouth promotion of sites and ESP outreach efforts of volunteer partners. In contrast, the total number of taxpayer contacts at IRS’s 401 walk-in sites declined slightly in the 2008 filing season compared to previous years.

In order to assess the quality of the assistance at volunteer sites, IRS conducts mystery shopping, site, and tax return reviews. This filing season, IRS officials conducted 85 mystery shopping reviews for which the accuracy rate for return preparation averaged 75 percent at volunteer sites. While this is an improvement from last year, we are still concerned that, because of the low number of mystery shopping reviews conducted, the quality of volunteer-prepared returns remains largely unknown and information as a whole is unavailable.

IRS is in the process of improving how it measures the efficacy of its outreach efforts. In response to our recommendation, IRS has hired a contractor to conduct surveys and focus groups to assess the IRS partners’, such as the AARP, ability to reach their target populations, e.g., the elderly and limited English proficiency and rural populations, and measure the effectiveness and quality of that outreach.

In response to another one of our recommendations, to further improve its quality assessment at walk-in sites, IRS has expanded contact recording— a system IRS uses to record and assess the quality of other interactions between its employees and taxpayers—at walk-in sessions to include return preparation. According to IRS officials, the agency hired adequate staff to review the recorded sessions, which are considerably longer for return preparation assistance than for tax law or account assistance. Further, IRS officials report that by the start of the 2009 filing season, contact recording of return preparation will be operational at 306 sites.

The accuracy of account assistance at IRS walk-in sites was 85 percent, similar to last year. However, the accuracy of tax law assistance declined significantly to 68 percent, down from 80 percent last year. According to IRS officials, this decline was, in part, due to the timing for hiring and training hundreds of new staff, which was dependent on when IRS received funding. Further, those staff had to be trained on a new IRS’s interactive tax law assistance guide at the beginning of the filing season. IRS officials expect tax law accuracy to improve for the 2009 filing season as walk-in site staff gain experience with the new guide.

The Costs and Foregone Revenue Associated with Implementing ESP Are Expected to Reach over $900 Million and IRS Plans to Document Lessons Learned

Based on IRS data, the estimated costs and foregone revenue of implementing ESP will reach up to $960 million. This includes $202 million IRS received in a supplemental appropriation in fiscal year 2008, plus funding transferred from the Financial Management Service and IRS’s user fee accounts (see table 6). Because IRS anticipates the need for continued funding associated with the implementation of ESP, it requested an amendment to its fiscal year 2009 budget to receive an additional $68 million, $29 million of which it has already received under a continuing resolution. This funding would be used, in part, to cover telephone demand, which IRS expects to remain well above normal in 2009 due in part to ESP.

Because of the timing of ESP, IRS officials said that they did not have time to hire, conduct background checks on, and train additional staff to handle the increased telephone volume. Instead, IRS shifted hundreds of Automated Collection System (ACS) staff to answer calls to the Rebate Hotline from March through August 2008.

As of August, IRS reported $655 million in foregone revenue because of ACS staff being taken off their collections work to answer the unprecedented volume of calls related to ESP. As we previously reported, IRS considered alternatives to shifting ACS staff, including contracting out, using other staff, or using Social Security Administration (SSA) staff, but decided the alternatives were not feasible. According to IRS officials, while IRS expected some foregone revenue and paper backlog associated with the use of collections and other staff, it determined that delivering and supporting ESP was its highest priority, after the filing season.

According to IRS officials, volunteer partners helped IRS mitigate the costs of delivering ESP to the targeted population of benefits recipients. These partners played a key role in funding and carrying out outreach to inform targeted groups, e.g., elderly, limited English proficiency, disabled, about their eligibility for the economic stimulus. For example, AARP supplied economic stimulus information on its Web site and in its monthly bulletin, and IRS officials reported that AARP paid for one of the mailings to people over 65 who may have been eligible for a stimulus payment, but had not yet filed a tax return. According to IRS officials, partly because of the efforts of the volunteer partners, 82 percent of the targeted individuals eligible for the economic stimulus participated in the program. This level of participation is relatively high compared to some other programs. For example, we have previously reported that participation rates in entitlement programs generally range from about 47 percent for the Food Stamp Program, to 75 percent for the EITC program.

Consistent with best practices for government organizations, IRS is compiling a report on ESP that will summarize the costs to implement ESP and the effects on filing season operations. IRS is working to verify the cost information associated with ESP. As part of its report, IRS hired a contractor to conduct a lessons-learned study, which is due to be issued in December 2008.

IRS Does Not Fully Use Its Existing MEA and Congressional Expansion of MEA in Two New Areas Could Enhance Enforcement at Low Cost

IRS has authority to disallow child and dependent credit claims on returns with the filing status of “Married Filing Separately;” however, if taxpayers use this filing status, they would not be eligible for the credit. Under IRS’s procedures, it processes all returns with child and dependent care claims and issues refunds as appropriate. IRS then audits the taxpayer who made the claims using “Married Filing Separately” as appropriate. IRS audited about 6,000 of these cases in 2005. After verifying the claim is ineligible, IRS would be left trying to collect the money from taxpayers, who may have spent the money and now owe back taxes, plus penalties and interest. For lower-income taxpayers, this may represent a substantial financial burden.

Some taxpayers claiming child and dependent care credits may file as “Married Filing Separately” by mistake. They could be eligible for the credit if they file using a different status, such as “Single,” “Married Filing Jointly,” “Head of Household,” or “Qualifying Widow(er) with a Dependent Child. Using audits to correct such mistakes is labor intensive for IRS. IRS officials confirmed that, if IRS used its MEA in these cases, then it could inform the taxpayer of their potential eligibility in the associated math error notices.

A second area where IRS has MEA but does not use it is to disallow EITC clams is when taxpayers are listed as the noncustodial parent in the FCR. Noncustodial parents are generally ineligible for EITC, because in most but not all cases, the child have not lived with the noncustodial parent for more than the required 6 months of the tax year to meet EITC eligibility. According to EITC officials, IRS does not use its MEA in these cases because the child may have lived with the non-custodial parent for more than 6 months, meeting the residency requirements for eligibility; however, the FCR may not reflect this living arrangement. Instead of using its MEA, IRS audits less than 2 percent of these cases; however, it does not audit more cases because audits are labor intensive. As a consequence, most of the more than 41,000 claims for $91 million in 2006 by noncustodial parents were allowed without verification. IRS does not know how many of these claims were incorrect, but for the claims it audited, the error rate was about 91 percent of claims for 2006.

IRS officials reported that, as part of their 2009 EITC Research Plan, they plan to review the reliability and applicability of linking the custodial information in the FCR to EITC eligibility. They stated that if the FCR is found to be sufficiently reliable, IRS could use its MEA to automatically identify and correct ineligible EITC claims.

By focusing on FCR data alone, IRS’s review may be missing another way to use MEA to verify EITC claims by noncustodial parents and minimize the chance of disallowing eligible claims. IRS could combine FCR data with factors it currently uses to select returns for audits, factors such as taxpayer characteristics like filing status. In a limited sample of returns from tax year 2006, audit data show that the FCR combined with audit selection factors such as filing status allowed IRS to accurately identify ineligible EITC claims by noncustodial parents in 98 percent of cases. Without including a more thorough assessment of this approach in its FCR review, IRS will not know the extent to which more accurate eligibility decisions could be made. Because the agency has MEA to use the FCR, the agency does not need additional authority to use FCR together with the audit selection factors.

Two Areas Where IRS Could Use Math Error Checks, but Would Need Legislative Authority

We identified two areas related to IRA contributions where IRS officials reported that they have the technical ability to accurately identify and correct math errors and did so as recently as 2006. However, at that time, IRS Chief Counsel determined that the Congress would need to grant IRS additional MEA to use age-based information to automatically disallow certain ineligible IRA contributions and thus IRS discontinued the use of math error checks in these areas.

First, some taxpayers under the age of 50 claim IRA contribution amounts that are more than allowed. These taxpayers incorrectly claim the amount intended for people over 50 making IRA “catch-up” contributions. In 2004, IRS identified 24,000 incidences of these IRA contribution overclaims resulting in $23.2 million in underreported taxes. IRS used age data from the SSA database to check for age eligibility of these contributions. IRS counsel determined that the agency does not have MEA to use age-based data in this manner, although IRS has and does use age data from the SSA database for other math error types, such as EITC eligibility.

Second, some taxpayers over the age of 70-½ claim contributions to a traditional IRA, which they are not entitled to make. By law, taxpayers over the age of 70-½ cannot make contributions to traditional IRAs. TIGTA found that in 2006, 1,826 taxpayers over the age of 70-½ improperly claimed $4 million in IRA deductions for an estimated loss of revenue of $601,000. IRS used age data from the SSA database to check for age eligibility of these contributions. IRS officials believe that this problem is likely to become significantly larger as the population ages. However, IRS currently lacks MEA to identify and correct ineligible claims.

Conclusion

Despite the challenges of the economic stimulus program, IRS was generally successful providing service to taxpayers during the 2008 filing season. The major exception was telephone service, where the large, unanticipated increase in call volume caused by ESP significantly affected performance.

Although IRS focuses on taxpayer service during the filing season, it also uses MEA to conduct important compliance checks while processing tax returns. There are two areas where IRS could use its existing authority more fully and where the agency could improve service through notices informing taxpayers of potential eligibility for child and dependent care credits. With additional MEA, IRS could further increase compliance, improve taxpayer service, and gain additional efficiencies.

Recommendations for Executive Action

We recommend that the Commissioner of Internal Revenue direct the appropriate officials to (1) use IRS’s existing MEA to identify and correct child and dependent care credit claims on “Married Filing Separately” returns; (2) include information on math error notices to inform taxpayers that they may be eligible for the child and dependent care credit if they file under a different status, such as “Single,” “Married Filing Jointly,” “Head of Household,” or “Qualifying Widow(er) with a dependent child”; and (3) assess the effectiveness of combining FCR and other data on taxpayer characteristics to verify the eligibility of EITC claims from noncustodial parents.

Matters for Congressional Consideration

Given the potential for improving compliance now and in the future, the Congress should provide IRS with the authority to use math error checks to identify and correct returns with ineligible (1) IRA “catch-up” contributions, and (2) contributions to traditional IRAs from taxpayers over age 70-½.

Agency Comments and Our Evaluation

The Deputy Commissioner of Internal Revenue provided written comments in a December 4, 2008 letter in which she agreed with all our recommendations and outlined IRS’s actions to address those recommendations. With respect to child and dependent care credit claims on “Married Filing Separately” returns, IRS plans to make programming changes that will allow the agency to use math error checks to identify and correct claims, and create notices to inform taxpayers of their possible eligibility for the child and dependent care credit if they file under a different status. For the recommendation to assess the effectiveness of combining FCR with other data on taxpayer characteristics, IRS plans to do so as part of its study on the reliability and applicability of non- custodial information in the FCR.

The Deputy Commissioner also supported our suggestions for congressional consideration to provide IRS with legal authority to automatically correct returns for individual retirement account contributions that violate the dollar or age limits. She further stated that they could increase compliance and improve taxpayer service.

As agreed with your offices, unless you publicly announce its contents earlier, we plan no further distribution of the report until 30 days after its date. At that time, we will send copies of this report to the Secretary of the Treasury, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue; the Director, Office of Management and Budget; relevant congressional committees; and other interested parties. This report is available at no charge on GAO’s web site at http://www.gao.gov.

For further information regarding this report, please contact James R. White, Director, Strategic Issues, on 202-512-9110 or whitej@gao.gov. Contacts for our Offices of Congressional Relations and Public Affairs may be found on the last page of this report. Individuals making key contributions to this report include Joanna Stamatiades, Assistant Director; Shea Bader; Julia Jebo; Karen O’Conor; Cheryl Peterson; and Neil Pinney.

Appendix I: Comments from the Internal Revenue Service

Appendix II: Key Dates and Activities of the 2008 Filing Season

Appendix III: Using IRS’s Math Error Authority to Process and Correct Returns with Math Errors

In the math error program, IRS uses computer programmed comparisons and calculations to systemically identify math errors during tax return processing (see fig. 3) for correction. These corrections involve mathematical calculation errors, incorrect taxpayer identification numbers, filing status and dependents, and missing schedules or forms. Once the computer programming detects an error, it forwards the tax return account to the Error Resolution System, where an IRS employee takes the appropriate action to resolve the error condition and provide the information needed to generate a notice to the taxpayer.

As early as the first codification of the Internal Revenue law in 1926, the Congress granted IRS math error authority (MEA) so that IRS does not have to provide the taxpayer with a statutory notice of deficiency for math errors. In general, these are errors that must be corrected in order for IRS to process the tax return. A 1976 statutory revision defined the authority to include not only mathematical errors, but other obvious errors such as omissions of data needed to substantiate an item on a return, and provided a statutory right to file a request for abatement of the assessment within 60 days after the notice is sent. In the 1990s, the Congress extended the authority five times to help determine eligibility for certain tax exemptions and credits. Table 7 summarizes the legislative authority on math error provisions for individual tax returns.

Appendix IV: IRS’s Processing Performance Relative to 2004-2008 Performance and 2008 Goals

Despite the added individual return volume due to the Economic Stimulus legislation, as of June 30, 2008, IRS met or exceeded seven out of the eight processing performance goals. As shown in table 8, IRS met or exceeded its goals for the percentage of errors included in deposits and correspondence (which was separated into letter and notice errors in previous years); deposit and refund timeliness (i.e., interest foregone by untimely deposits); and productivity and Individual Master File efficiency.

The one measure where performance was below IRS’s goal and last year’s level was the refund error rate, i.e., the percentage of refunds with IRS- cause errors issued to taxpayers by IRS. According to IRS officials, the increase in the refund error rate is attributed to a programming change that resulted in IRS catching, for example, changes of address or name changes, as it began transcribing data from paper returns. According to IRS officials, because the changes did not result in significant additional transcription, the increased error rate did not result in a delay of refunds or a delay in processing of returns.