I am beyond frustrated with the IRS and I feel for anyone who is in a situation where they have to deal with them.
I operate my business with a high level of integrity and providing an excellent customer experience is something I value greatly. I am an Enrolled Agent, a designation issued by the IRS that allows me to represent clients in their tax matters.
It is through these representations that I have had many of my own frustrating experiences with the IRS. I think it’s time that we as professionals in the industry start talking about the frustrating experiences that are an everyday occurrence with the IRS.
A system that collects and imposes trillions of dollars in taxes on us each and every year, should have a customer service system in place that provides assistance to customers when they need it. No one would ever choose to give their business to a company that treats its customers like the IRS treats taxpayers, yet this is happening every day and there’s no accountability for improvement.
I know I am just one person, just one voice, but I think I speak for thousands, probably hundreds of thousands when I say I am fed up with the IRS and their antiquated, outdated, time sucking systems.
As I write this I’ve been on hold with the IRS for 30 minutes. I’ve decided that in my less busy months of May - November, whenever I have to call the IRS and sit on hold, I will share about it here. (If you ever feel inclined to write about your experience contacting or dealing with the IRS, I would be happy to share your stories here as well.)
This call started with a client of mine who I’m helping get caught up on prior year filings. We filed her 2020 tax return a few months ago, by mail unfortunately because the IRS only allows efiling for the current year and two years prior.
Good news was that they processed it in under 6 months, which has been kind of unheard of for anything mailed-in to the IRS since Covid. Bad news was that the refund was almost $2,000 less than anticipated.
Now here’s a major complaint that I’ve had with the IRS for a long time. They (should) always send a letter anytime an adjustment is made to a tax refund amount. If they could time it so the letter arrived before or at least at the same time as the refund, a lot of confusion and questions could be avoided. Instead, the letters always seem to arrive days or sometimes even weeks after the taxpayer is already aware that they aren’t getting what they expected. This is a stressful experience for the taxpayer, as well as myself as their tax professional, and it could be easily avoided just by adjusting some timing metrics within the IRS’s automated system.
So for 2 days this particular taxpayer has been stressed out and confused. She tried contacting the IRS and was told conflicting things by different agents, transferred around multiple times, disconnected, all in all wasted about 2 hours of her time and still had no answers.
I assured her that a letter should be coming explaining the change (although I could see that the amount of her refund was reduced by the exact amount of one particular credit.) I thought the letter would at least have a fax number or a way to upload the missing documents so the credit could be reinstated.
(For the record, we mailed the entire return, with all schedules and attachments. How the IRS managed to lose 1 page of the tax return is beyond me.)
The letter that came did not clearly describe what was missing from the return, did not clearly note what change had been made, and did not give any options for providing the missing attachment, other than calling this number (hold times 2+ hours) or responding by mail, the same method we have already tried once and the form was lost.
But alas, that is what we will most likely end up doing, responding by mail, because that is literally the only option they are giving us.
Another interesting thing to note about this letter (CP 12 if you’re interested in the details) is that it says “If you don’t agree with the changes we made, call 800-829-0922 using “Your caller ID” provided on the top on page one.
There is nothing on the top of page one that says anything about “Your caller ID”. There’s a notice name, tax year, notice date, your TIN (mostly redacted), and last date to respond.
They did give us 60 days so that’s a little bit of good news since I’ve seen other letters that only give 30 days to respond, and sometimes by the time I get to see the letter, a week or two has already passed.
I have now been on hold for 1 hour and 9 minutes.
Finally after almost 2 hours, someone answered. Mr. Torro ID# 1005137318 in the collections department. I never selected anything in the automated system to indicate I wanted the collections department. This has happened to me numerous times before. Their automated menus and phone routing systems need a serious overhaul. When I told him my situation, he asked me what time it was where I was calling from (6:48pm) and then transferred me before I could ask where he was transferring to.
Thankfully, Mr. Baka ID# 1004146084 picked up within about five minutes. He was able to look up the taxpayer, verify my Power of Attorney on file, and then put me on a 5-7 minute hold. After two separate 5-7 minute holds while he researched the account, still all that he could come up with was that there was either a math error or a number missing from the tax return and that the refund amount changed. He could not tell me exactly what needed to be done to correct it, but was able to find a fax number for me and advised us to send in just the 8812 missing attachment. He said that within nine weeks, if the taxpayer is in fact entitled to the refund, they should receive the additional amount.
The fax number he gave me was 855.455.0010. He said it did not need a cover sheet.
The form has been faxed and documented in the client file and after 2 hours and 18 minutes on the phone with IRS, hopefully the issue will be resolved.
There’s got to be a better way! Please join me in making public the severe shortfalls in our Internal Revenue system. We as taxpayers and the ultimate funders of the IRS, deserve to be treated better.
I am committing to continue posting about this flawed system until some real change happens that allows taxpayers (and tax professionals like myself) to easily contact the IRS when in need of assistance.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and share if you feel led to go on this crusade with me.