The Internal Revenue Service is stopping most unannounced visits to taxpayers' residences and businesses by its revenue officers after a rising number of threats has put its employees' safety at risk.
Instead, the IRS said Monday that it will send an appointment letter, formally known as a 725-B, to taxpayers and schedule a follow-up meeting when a matter needs to be discussed.
In some limited cases, however, revenue officers will still need to make unannounced visits, such as when the agency needs to serve a summons or subpoena, or when there's an enforcement action like the seizure of assets at risk of being removed from the U.S. But those instances typically only occur a few hundred times a year, as opposed to the tens of thousands of unannounced visits that IRS revenue officers have generally needed to make every year. It won't affect IRS Criminal Investigation employees, who can still make unannounced visits.
The change comes amid a rising level of threats against IRS agents, especially after passage of last year's Inflation Reduction Act, which included an extra $80 billion over 10 years for IRS taxpayer service, technology and enforcement. Opponents of the legislation have promulgated conspiracy theories warning of 10,000 armed IRS agents being hired with the funding to raid people's homes and businesses, and Republicans in Congress have repeatedly pushed to repeal the funding since taking control of the House in January. The Biden administration agreed last month to redistribute some of the IRS's extra funding to other domestic programs in a deal with Republicans to avoid a default over the federal government's debt limit.
IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel was asked by Accounting Today during a news conference Monday whether those types of fears from the IRA had led to the change in policy, but he declined to link the two. "Can we achieve the goal of effective tax administration? That's why we're ending these unannounced visits today," he said.
He explained the overall changes upfront during the press conference. IRS revenue officers have long visited homes and businesses in person when there were unpaid taxes and people hadn't responded to notices in the mail, but those visits came fraught with danger for both taxpayers and tax collectors.
"These are tough jobs filled with uncertainty," said Werfel. "The revenue officers work to resolve outstanding account balances by collecting unpaid taxes and unfiled tax returns. Following my arrival as IRS commissioner four months ago, and the creation of the new IRS strategic operating plan in April, we're taking a fresh look at how the IRS operates to better serve taxpayers and the nation. Making this change to end unannounced visits is a commonsense step."
After becoming commissioner, Werfel learned there have been longstanding concerns about the visits, especially as scammers have been impersonating IRS agents in robocalls in recent years and threatening to arrest innocent people for unpaid taxes.
"With the growth in scam artists, taxpayers are increasingly uncertain who is knocking on their doors," he said. "For our IRS employees, there were fears about their own personal safety on these visits."
Those concerns were shared by the National Treasury Employees Union, he noted; the NTEU has long advocated for increased safety for IRS employees.
"There is nothing more important than keeping our federal employees safe on the job, which is why we commend IRS leadership for this decision halting all unannounced taxpayer visits," said NTEU national president Tony Reardon in a press release Monday. "The revenue officers we represent will continue to efficiently and effectively carry out their mission of helping taxpayers meet their lawful tax obligations through other means of communication."
The NTEU pointed out that IRS revenue officers for decades have met with taxpayers to help bring them into compliance and collect the taxes they owe. "Unfortunately, the hostile rhetoric and false claims about IRS employees have made their work more dangerous in recent years," Reardon added, taking aim at critics in Congress. "As long as elected officials continue to mislead the American people about the legal, legitimate role that IRS employees play in our democracy, NTEU will continue to insist on better security for the employees we represent. It is outrageous that our nation's civil servants have to live in fear just because they chose a career in public service. Once again, I call on certain members of Congress to immediately stop spreading lies about the IRS and its employees and recognize that their inflammatory comments can have dangerous consequences."
Werfel said the move was aimed more at public safety and the scam artists.
"The IRS leadership team agrees about the importance of safety, and I do too," he said. "That's why I made this decision effective immediately. Ending unannounced visits is good for everyone: the taxpayer and the IRS employees. It's good for everyone with one exception: The losers in this decision are the scam artists posing as the IRS who threaten hardworking taxpayers. The change reflects the spirit of work underway at the IRS in our transformation work. This reflects the ongoing evolution of our work when we have proper long-term funding. We have ways of effectively collecting revenue owed to the government without knocking on doors unannounced. To help this, the Inflation Reduction Act funding will add more staffing for compliance work, including revenue officers, as part of our effort to ensure fairness in tax enforcement, including focusing on high-income taxpayers with tax issues. Improved analytics will also help IRS compliance efforts focused on those with the most serious tax issues."
The IRS will be replacing the unannounced visits with mailed 725-B letters to schedule in-person meetings. "This will help taxpayers feel more prepared when it is time to meet," said Werfel. "Taxpayers whose cases are assigned to a revenue officer will now be able to schedule face-to-face meetings at a set place and time. They will have the necessary information and documents in hand to reach resolution of their cases more quickly."
He said that would help eliminate the burden of multiple future meetings. Under the old policy, the IRS typically assigned about 100,000 cases to revenue officers each year, but he didn't have a specific number of unannounced visits that occurred. IRS auditors and revenue agents don't make these kinds of unannounced visits, and the change in policy will affect about 2,300 revenue officers.
However, it won't apply to the IRS's CI unit.
"Our Criminal Investigation agents, like other law enforcement officers, have different requirements, and their investigative work will still require unannounced visits," said Werfel. "Today's decision is part of a broader plan that will help us work smarter and be more efficient. When we are properly resourced, it's easier for us to work more efficiently. It's easier for us to improve technology, it's easier to improve our analytical tools. This will help us better focus our resources on those who have a compliance issue, reducing burden on honest taxpayers and allowing us to concentrate on priority areas, including tax evasion by high-income taxpayers and in corporate lanes. Today's announcement is the right thing to do, and the right time to end an era at the IRS. This is good for taxpayers and the nation."
A leading Republican was skeptical about the IRS's announcement.
"There's little reason to cheer the IRS's recent announcement that it is supposedly 'ending' unannounced visits by revenue officers," said House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Missouri, in a statement Monday. "The agency has yet to provide a full explanation for why it used such disturbing tactics to show up on people's doorstep and invade their privacy. Americans remain concerned about the agency's political targeting and favoritism, regardless of whether they announce their visits or not."
