How did your tax filing go? If you needed any help from the Internal Revenue Service, chances are it was awful.
Lines of taxpayers seeking assistance looped around the block at some IRS branches this year. Waiting times stretched into hours. An estimated six in 10 callers to the agency's toll-free lines haven't been able to get through, and those who have could get help with only the most basic questions. Everyone else was free to try their luck on the agency's bewildering website.
This dysfunction shouldn't really be a surprise, as Bloomberg reports. The IRS has become a terrible place to work in recent years, with stagnant salaries, staffing shortages, archaic technology and budget cuts so severe that some employees are buying their own office supplies. Not to mention the extravagant rhetorical assaults from Capitol Hill.
It didn't have to be this way. Since 2010, the IRS budget has been slashed by $1.2 billion, its workforce has declined by 11 percent, and its funding for training has plunged by 83 percent. Congress enacted these cuts even while giving the agency more elaborate responsibilities--such as the tax provisions of the Affordable Care Act and the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act--and even as tax-related identity fraud has soared.
In short, Congress has written an outrageously complicated tax code, repeatedly cut funding to help voters with their returns and made cheating easier than ever. You don't need an accountant to figure out that this is a formula for disaster.
Editorial on 04/16/2015