Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 23, 1990 TAG: 9003232847
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/1 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
But if you can get through to the agency, you have a better chance than last year of getting the correct answer to a tax question. The General Accounting Office says IRS employees give the right answer 78 percent of the time, up from 66 percent last year.
The bad news is that only 34 percent of callers are getting through to the IRS, down sharply from 61 percent in 1989, Jennie Stathis of the congressional investigative agency told the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee Thursday.
"It bothers the hell out of me that taxpayer service has declined that way," IRS Commissioner Fred Goldberg testified. He said the inability to take phone calls resulted from a decision by the agency to reduce its service - rather than the quality - because of cuts in its 1990 budget.
He said the IRS also is getting calls from 7 percent more taxpayers than had been expected.
Goldberg said the IRS budget that President Bush proposed for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1 is reasonable. He cautioned that any reductions would harm efforts to collect $80 billion of delinquent accounts, force more cuts in taxpayer services and lead to further deterioration of a computer system that already has outlived its usefulness.
"The only hope we have of meeting legitimate taxpayer expectations in dealing with their government is to modernize our systems," Goldberg said.
The administration has proposed a $6.1 billion budget for the IRS, up 12 percent from the 1990 fiscal year.
But Goldberg said the agency is still suffering from previous tight budgets. "I am afraid that the tax system will continue to pay the price of the 1989-1990 hiring freeze and failure to provide adequate training and support for our employees for years to come," he said.
Stathis gave this rundown on how the IRS is doing this filing season:
The GAO telephoned 20 tax questions to 29 IRS offices and scored 1,261 responses; 78 percent were correct.
Through March 17, taxpayers had called the IRS 31.5 million times and the IRS had picked up the phone 10.7 million times. During a similar period last year, there were far fewer calls - 19.3 million - but 11.8 million of them were answered.
Processing of returns is 12.5 percent ahead of last year's pace; returns received are up 3.5 percent; the number of refunds is up 16.7 percent.
The percentage of returns with taxpayer errors or IRS processing mistakes is dropping, from 16 percent last year to 14 percent this year.
by CNB