National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins said she had joked with Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Chuck Rettig that the day she arrived in March 2020 was the day he shut the IRS down, but luckily the NTA got all of its employees teleworking within about a week. Collins spoke during an online tax conference hosted by the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.
"Although we were up and running, our … colleagues on the IRS side were not as efficient because a lot of the people that you all may know in the service centers or the campuses, they tend not to have the ability to work from home," she said. "They don't have computers assigned to them. They haven't had the security training and the other things."
Four days before Collins began her role, the IRS closed its national distribution center in Bloomington, Illinois, following a statewide shelter-in-place order because of COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus. The closure followed confirmation on March 20 from the National Treasury Employees Union that IRS facilities in Philadelphia and Fresno, California, had shuttered as a result of the outbreak. The IRS also temporarily closed all Taxpayer Assistance Centers.
Then, on March 30, the IRS ordered all employees whose work was portable to work remotely to decrease exposure to the coronavirus.
"Advocate" is part of the name National Taxpayer Advocate because the unit serves as an independent part of the IRS that advocates for change for taxpayers, but it is difficult to advocate if the IRS has closed down phone lines, campuses and offices, Collins said.
"So the challenge we had up front … was really trying to find our counterpart to actually initiate the change," she said. Nevertheless, the IRS has "come a long way," she said, and "we've created some sort of workarounds to get some things done."
While the National Taxpayer Advocate office could easily pivot to remote work, there were some delays attributable to the pandemic, Collins said. The unit is required by statute to have at least one office in every state including the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, totaling around 77 offices, she said, along with "three or four that we're scheduling to open up."
"Actually, we were going to do it this summer, but we pushed it off for a year," she said.
COVID-19 also played a major impact in what the National Taxpayer Advocate wrote in its annual report to Congress, Collins said. The report, released this month, said Congress' failure to sufficiently fund the IRS is the primary driver of most problems taxpayers face.
"When I started, COVID was just kind of taking off, and its impact to the community and to taxpayers as well as the IRS," she said. "So when we were thinking about the serious problems, we're really kind of putting a COVID lens" on the report.
COVID-19 also made things worse for taxpayer customer service. The report said the IRS received about 100.5 million telephone calls in fiscal year 2020, and survey results showed most taxpayers wanted wait time to improve.
The NTA recommend that the IRS update its technology systems by making a "contact dashboard" similar to what is used by the California Franchise Tax Board, which would allow a caller to know the hours of operation and estimated wait times for different types of contact methods. Then the caller could save time by figuring out the best time to call, the NTA said.
"California, I'll give them kudos, they have a very robust online system for both taxpayers and practitioners," Collins said. "We've been pushing … and I think the IRS does not disagree that IRS needs to have something similar, so you can bypass a lot of the picking up the phone or any correspondence."
NTA reports always have a section on the 10 most litigated issues, and that will change in future reports, Collins said. Historically the NTA looks at opinions from federal district courts, appeals courts and the U.S. Tax Court to determine the 10 most litigated issues, but the approach this upcoming year will look at litigation that is in an earlier stage, she said.
"I'm going to take a different approach this upcoming year because as a former … litigator, I look at litigation from actually from the time you start an exam to the time you go to appeals, but at least from the time you file that petition in Tax Court," she said. "To me, that is the beginning of litigation, so we're going to change our approach from looking at issues from the back end to looking at issues, sort of from the front end."
Going forward, the NTA will look at what petitions are filed, the issues in those petitions and go through and determine if the issues have changed, Collins said.
--Additional reporting by Theresa Schliep and David van den Berg. Editing by Tim Ruel.
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