The IRS got an $80 billion gift from us, the taxpayers. Wasn’t it great of them to be so generous with your money? 😅 Anyway, what are they going to do with such a huge chunk of change? 💰 The IRS recently announced their plans, so let’s take a look and see what’s in store.
Here are Five Fast Facts about the IRS’ new plan to spend our money:
- 📈 Staff Up - They’ve already hired 5000 new phone operators to assist with this year’s tax season. That has prompted a major improvement, with them answering almost 90% of incoming calls (up from 17% last year) and reducing wait time to 4 minutes (down from 27 last year). No one wants to talk to the IRS…but if you have to, at least they’re making it easier!
- 💻 Tech Up - The IRS is planning to create tools to help taxpayers find and correct mistakes before filing, to resolve filers’ errors more quickly, and to wipe out its paper backlog in the next five years. Too bad that backlog doesn’t seem to include my tax payments (or yours, I’m assuming).
- 🔍 Audit Up - The current audit rate of millionaires is 2.4% (down from 8.4% in 2010). Only about half of the country’s biggest businesses are audited; in the past it used to be almost all of them. Brace yourself, more audits incoming!
- 🤏 Mind The Gap - The IRS claims it can’t collect about $600 billion of taxes owed each year. They call this the “tax gap.” One of the new priorities will be to close that gap by auditing more of the wealthy and large corporations. Individual taxpayers are 99% compliant; businesses and the wealthy are not. Hey, IRS: maybe you should just make doing taxes simpler and faster, close those loopholes, that kind of thing. (Just sayin’)
- 😱 Concerns - Some people warn that things could get seriously out of hand. Huge tech advances could give the IRS unprecedented info and analytics – which means control – over taxpayers. They could use that info to audit certain groups of people more than others, or even target people as a form of political harassment. Nah, a politician would never do that, right…?
🔥Bottom line: Some see this as no big deal, some see this as a critical problem of government overreach. Regardless, the impact on your Paychecks has already happened (thank you, Congress), so there shouldn’t be any big change there. But boy, if you get caught up in all those new audits, it could get annoying in a hurry.
What do you think of these IRS plans?
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