It’s official: Paying taxes can make you a stressed-out wreck.
So says the national taxpayer advocate, who is calling for the Internal Revenue Service to create a “Taxpayer Anxiety Index” to help it handle Americans frustrated by the agency’s figure-it-out-yourself approach.
Nina Olson, who is retiring after 18 years as the nation’s congressionally mandated taxpayer advocate, proposed the index as tool that would foster trust in the agency and compliance with the 2017 tax law. The more anxious a taxpayer scores on the index, she wrote in her 160-page "Objectives" report to Congress released Thursday, the more he or she should have access to a live IRS employee, rather than be directed to the vast IRS website or routed through automated calls.
Olson didn’t elaborate on how the index might be constructed, and the IRS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the independent advocate’s report.
The Republican overhaul cut rates for individuals and businesses and doubled the standard deduction. It also capped deductions for state and local taxes, or SALT, at $10,000, and introduced a new deduction for small businesses, partnerships and other so-called pass-throughs.
The changes were the biggest tax-code revamp in three decades and spawned a series of new forms to fill out and confusion about withholding calculations. Some taxpayers got smaller refunds this year, the first filing season under the 2017 overhaul, because they had too little taken out of their paychecks last year. Olson has said that it took her three tries to get her withholding correct.
Olson’s proposal is a new twist on perennial criticism of the IRS’s ability to adequately help bewildered taxpayers.
The IRS has long championed a twin policy of customer service and enforcement. But only 25% of taxpayers who called the agency during the recent filing season got through to an IRS employee.
Under commissioner Charles Rettig, the agency in May unveiled a six-year modernization plan that includes goals such as offering callback capability on 95% of agency phone lines by fiscal year 2024 and making it easier for taxpayers to check payment options online. But nowhere in the plan do the words “‘world-class’ customer or taxpayer service appear,” said Olson. Her Taxpayer Advocate Service is an independent within the IRS.
‘Taxpayer Anxiety’