Most people reading this blog probably already knew this, but it was news to me. There's a department at the IRS that is supposed to be charged with helping taxpayers with problems with the IRS. This was gleaned from an interview with the head of that department, Nina Olson, which aired on C-Span on 7/1/13. Watch it here.
Ms. Olson explained that the National Taxpayer Advocate's office was created by law in the 1980s, and currently they have 1,900 employees spread among 75 offices around the country with at least one office in each state.
She said that the IRS not only collects taxes, about $2.52 Trillion per year, but it's also in the distribution business as the administrator of the second largest anti-poverty program in the country. Examples there include payouts from the Making Work Pay credit, economic stimulus, 1st time home buyer credit, and the adoption credit. She puts the IRS involvement in Obamacare into that same category. So if we didn't know Obamacare was an antipoverty program, we do now.
[Aside: That's brilliant. If you don't like the IRS or Obamacare, then you must hate the poor. You heartless bigot.]
Ms. Olson said she learned about the IRS' targeting of TEA Party groups "like everybody else did," which was at the American Bar Association conference where Lois Lerner answered that planted question about the matter just prior to the release of the Inspector General's report. And Ms. Olson's response was to put forward some recommendations to the IRS to prevent it from happening again.
The C-Span interview can be heard here. And the NTA's website can be found at TaxpayerAdvocate.irs.gov.
There's a suggestion box where you can put your two cents in. The comments left there --PDF-- are interesting with the flat tax being a very popular suggestion. The IRS can't implement that and would probably fight to keep it from becoming law. But maybe Congress will eventually see the light. We can hope.
Anyway, Ms. Olson sounded sincere and really did offer some good suggestions, simplify the tax code, for example. But other than talk about it, there's not much else she can do. So it's good that she's out there talking about it.
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