It’s pretty remarkable, what happens when government is adequately funded. The Internal Revenue Service is proving it, already putting its new funding to use to making this a normal, relatively painless tax season. Just last fall, it got nearly $80 billion to spend over the next 10 years in the Inflation Reduction Act and it turned it around fast, thanks entirely to congressional Democrats and President Joe Biden. That’s the funding, by the way, that Barely Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his band of maniacs tried to repeal in their first big policy bill—the bill that would have cost the nation $114 billion over the next decade.
With enough funding, the agency is answering 90% of its phone calls, actually providing customer service. It’s processed almost every return filed so far for the year—99.7% of them so far, while also dispensing with it backlog of overdue returns. It’s got 2 million paper returns—yes, paper—from the 2022 and 2021 tax years that still need to be reviewed or corrected, down from nearly 24 million this time last year. It’s because it could finally hire enough people to both answer the phones and handle these files and maintain other systems.
“That means returns are coming in more accurately,” Timur Taluy, CEO of FileYourTaxes.com told the Washington Post. “The IRS systems are able to process them more quickly. That’s a real benefit to taxpayers.” Taluy is one of a panel of industry experts that consults with the IRS. “An appropriately funded IRS, given its skill set and people, can make a filing season work.”
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