AICPA Demands Faster PPS Response

[Lee B]

 

AICPA demands IRS pick up the phone faster for tax pros

 

"The American Institute of CPAs wants the Internal Revenue Service to pick up the phone faster on its so-called Practitioner Priority Service for tax professionals and make other fixes, pointing to a "plummeting" level of service in recent years.

Taxpayers and tax pros alike have long complained about the difficulty of reaching the IRS over the phone and those complaints have mounted during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Despite recent efforts by the IRS to ease the burden that the backlog has caused for taxpayers and practitioners, the AICPA notes that service levels for the practitioner priority service phone line had been in continuous decline for several years.

 

 

The National Taxpayer Advocate's annual report to Congress found that the percentage of calls answered on the PPS line declined from 78.3% in fiscal year 2019 to 28.0% in FY 2021, with the average speed of answering the phone nearly doubling from 8.8 minutes to 16.1 minutes over that same period. Still, that was better than the level of service for regular taxpayers, where the percentage of calls answered by IRS employees declined from 28.7% in FY 2019 to 11.4% in FY 2021 and the average speed of answer went from 16.2 minutes in FY 2019 to 22.8 minutes in FY 2021. Many taxpayers have complained they were unable to get through at all. 

"We are hearing from tax practitioners everyday regarding their significant PPS line challenges and the impact those challenges have on their interactions with IRS on behalf of taxpayers," said the AICPA letter."

[Lee B]

This is the definition of "irony" since these are our elected representatives who created the situation!

Here we go lurching from one crisis to the next, with no evidence of long term planning or thinking!

"U.S. lawmakers are pressing the IRS to explain how it plans to relieve a backlog of tax returns that have delayed refunds and to detail what measures it's taking to improve customer service.

Dozens of congressional Republicans and Democrats made the demands in a letter to the Internal Revenue Service, obtained by Bloomberg News.

The IRS has said it plans to reduce by year-end the backlog of paper filings, which have been running at historically high levels since the pandemic hit. But the lawmakers, citing data from an IRS watchdog, said that the backlog has grown and that the agency has failed to meet targets to hire new employees.

Internal Revenue Service headquarters in Washington, D.C."

 

"The IRS must take additional steps to improve customer service issues, decrease processing delays, and work down the backlog of paper returns and correspondence by continuing the maximum use of overtime and surge teams," according to the letter, signed by 93 House and Senate lawmakers.

The group also called for "the continued suspension of automated notices and collections — which have been critical in reducing pandemic-related tax return and correspondence backlogs." 

The group is led by Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia on the Democratic side and Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania on the GOP side.

The lawmakers asked IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig to answer questions this week about how the agency plans to resolve the backlog and bring on additional workers."