CONGRESS TO HEAR FROM IRS COMMISSIONER

Congress to hear from IRS Commissioner. IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig will report on the current tax filing season to the House Ways and Means Committee's Oversight Subcommittee next week, the committee's chair, Bill Pascrell Jr, D-N.J. said. The hearing will be webcast live and available at the Ways and Means Committee's website. The Oversight Subcommittee heard from National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins about challenges facing taxpayers. In her testimony, Collins identified the IRS's near tern hurdles, chief among them delays in processing returns and correspondence and a resulting backlog. Processing paper returns would likely remain the Service's biggest predicament throughout the year., Collins said. Congress to hear from IRS Commissioner.

Collins proposed solutions that she said should also reduce the current filing season's challenges--some of which the IRS has now implemented to one degree or another. These including a "surge strategy" of allocating employees to processing returns, bolstering its hiring and pay of processing personnel, and a longer term plan to hire more IRS employees to increase collections over the long term. The recommendations made were previously made by AICPA, either on its own or in conjunction with a coalition of tax professionals, and other software tax related industry professionals. As a result the IRS decided to make the "surge team" and in the long haul to bring pay up for many of the IRS employees, allowing the IRS to hire more workers, to adjust to the real needs of the agency.

Once the backlog clears, the IRS plans to aggressively go after delinquent taxpayers, by enforcing collection action, such as tax liens and IRS Wage Garnishment notices. Taxpayers who are behind and have back taxes owed or unfiled returns, would be well advised to contact a Tax Resolution Services firm and ask about the IRS Fresh Start Program, to determine any tax relief options available to them. The IRS backlog should be cleared up by late summer of 2022.