IRS advice often falls short
By Anastasia Ustinova
Knight Ridder News Service
WASHINGTON — It's widely known that if you hit a snag while doing your taxes, the IRS' free help phones offer slow and sometimes inaccurate advice. But what if you drop by an IRS taxpayer assistance center for help?
For IRS phone help, call (800) 829-1040. The agency offers, among other things, free preparation help for taxpayers over 60 and low-income ($35,000 or less) taxpayers. The IRS offers assistance at its Web site, www.irs.gov. Taxpayers can receive free personal assistance in local IRS offices. To locate an office near you, go to www.irs.gov/localcontacts /index.html. The Honolulu office is at 300 Ala Moana. Call 539-2099 for information. The AARP offers tax help at its Web site at www.aarp.org or by phone at (888) 227-7669.
It may be worse, IRS Inspector General Pamela Gardiner told a Senate subcommittee yesterday.
Help with federal taxes
Gardiner's auditors re-examined 23 tax returns prepared by IRS employees at assistance centers nationwide and picked at random. Nineteen of them were done incorrectly, Gardiner told the Senate Subcommittee on Transportation, Treasury and General Government.
"How can we expect taxpayers to understand and comply with the complexities of the tax code when IRS employees themselves have so much trouble understanding and explaining it?" sputtered Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., the subcommittee chairman.
IRS Commissioner Mark Everson acknowledged the problem. He said the IRS strives to train workers adequately, but it's a challenge.
"It's a complicated law," Everson told the panel.
Everson said the struggle to improve customer services, which Congress demanded in recent years, has been made more complicated by cuts in the IRS budget and complex changes in the tax code.
Today, the agency offers electronic tax filing, walk-in service, a toll-free help line and a Web site, www.irs.gov, that are intended to make taxpayers' lives easier.
According to Gardiner, IRS employees at 400 taxpayer assistance centers nationwide encountered 8.5 million taxpayers face-to-face last year. The problem: when auditors posing as taxpayers asked them to answer tax questions, the answers were right just 69 percent of the time.
The IRS Web site was slower to respond — typically three or four days — but it had an 80 percent accuracy rate, Gardiner said. In 2003, the IRS Web site handled 146,369 questions. More than 50 million taxpayers phoned the IRS help line.
If the IRS can't offer good answers, the only choice is to hire an accountant or do research themselves, said David Keating, the senior counselor of the National Taxpayers Union, an advocacy group which specializes in tax issues, based in Arlington, Va.
Taxpayers who consult the IRS should keep a record of the time and place where they got help and the name of the IRS employee who provided it, Keating suggested. If tax filings are inaccurate due to the IRS mistakes, Keating said, the agency may waive the penalty although not the tax itself.
Everson assured lawmakers that a new computerized customer account system due this summer would improve customer service in the future.
Gardiner, while critical of IRS performance in responding to taxpayers' inquiries, said it was an "impressive" improvement over 2002. She said the main improvements were in the Web site and the toll-free phone service.
