Posted on: Saturday, May 28, 2005

IRS to close 68 help centers

By Mary Dalrymple
Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service announced plans yesterday to close 68 taxpayer assistance centers and shift more customer service to telephone help lines and volunteer programs.

The changes anticipate cuts to the tax agency's budget for customer service next year. IRS Commissioner Mark Everson said taxpayers increasingly look for telephone and online tax help, which can be more accurate and less expensive.

"One of the greatest problems in government is that government never closes. It continues to limp along and try to do everything," Everson said. "What we're trying to do is recognize where things are growing."

None of the Hawai'i taxpayer assistance centers was closed.

To meet the expected cut to its customer service budget, the IRS also plans to reduce toll-free telephone assistance from 15 hours to 12 hours a day. Everson said taxpayers will notice no difference in waiting times.

The tax agency also plans to save money by ending a program that lets taxpayers with very simple tax returns file over the telephone, a program that fewer taxpayers use each year.

Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said the changes do not save enough money to meet the proposed budget reductions and more drastic service and job cuts might be on the way.

"We think this is probably just the beginning of the cuts that they're going to try to make, and I'm telling employees that," she said.

Everson said more changes won't affect taxpayer services unless lawmakers do not approve the more than $10 billion budget that the president requested.

"My biggest concern here is not that we're making these reductions," Everson said. "My concern here is that Congress will not provide all the money that the president's requested."

Taxpayers can visit taxpayer assistance sites to solve problems with their tax accounts, ask questions about tax laws or pick up forms and instructions. Low-income taxpayers can get help preparing tax returns.

The IRS said the taxpayer assistance centers are the most expensive type of customer service the agency offers, and many questions can be answered more accurately by routing taxpayers to experts over the telephone.

Critics have urged the IRS to reconsider its decision to close the centers, fearing that low-income and elderly taxpayers, along with those who have limited English skills, will not be able to get help with complex tax issues without the sites.

The IRS said fewer people visit the 400 sites for face-to-face tax help, and some of those sites primarily had distributed forms that could be picked up at libraries and post offices or downloaded from the IRS Web site.

More than 7.6 million people used the walk-in sites last year, down from almost 9 million the year before. The number of taxpayer visits to the IRS Web site jumped to 153 million last year from 103 million the year before. Electronically filed tax returns outpaced paper returns for the first time this year.

The IRS increasingly encourages taxpayers looking for face-to-face help with tax return preparation to visit volunteer sites run by nonprofit groups during the filing season. Many of those groups get training from the IRS.

The closures affect cities in 29 states. The IRS said it tried to minimize its impact on taxpayers by weighing factors that include taxpayer usage, facility costs and the number of volunteer sites in the region.

Areas with large numbers of low-income families and elderly taxpayers were less likely to be closed, Everson said.