In early June, the National Taxpayer Advocate offered you a job. Well, technically, she offered the couple of hundred accountants who attended her tax service update at the AICPA's Engage conference a job, but I'm sure she'd be happy to extend the offer to you.
Erin Collins made the pitch at the end of her session, once the attending CPAs and tax pros understood that she was one of them (she had worked in tax at KPMG for two decades), and that she understood (and shared) their frustrations with the Internal Revenue Service's backlogs, service levels, responsiveness, and Stone-Age technology. And so they laughed politely when she said that the IRS could use their help, and assumed that she was speaking tongue in cheek when she suggested they consider a short stint as a tax auditor.
"You are what the IRS needs — people who know what they're doing," she continued. "You're not going to bring someone in from college and say, 'Go audit Bill Gates.' We need experienced people to come in and give back (and not necessarily be there for a paycheck ...). So if you want to give back, and you want to feel good about what you're doing, and you don't want to have billables and to have to track your time — we're hiring!" she said.
Now, signing up for a hitch in Uncle Sam's tax corps may not be on your bucket list, but Collins' job offer points to a larger issue: The IRS needs all the help it can get.
No one is more aware of this than accountants and tax pros, of course. You know the IRS needs more people to answer phones and process returns, that it needs better qualified and more knowledgeable agents to help taxpayers and conduct audits, and that it needs to make serious improvements to its technology.
The $80 billion promised to the IRS by the Inflation Reduction Act has been whittled down to just under $60 billion by the debt limit deal, but it will still make possible a huge investment in what the service needs — talented people and new tech to replace systems that have been in place, in some cases, since the 1960s.
That last, in fact, may matter most: The complexity of the IRS's mission gives it as strong a claim to needing the latest technology available as just about any branch of the government, and yet it has never been able to afford an appropriate IT infrastructure.
The IRS is an easy organization to hate, for reasons that are its own fault, and for many more that are not. But in the end, governments require revenue. And that means giving the IRS the help and money it needs to hire the right people and build the right systems.
Whether it means you have to personally work there, I'll leave up to you — but the Taxpayer Advocate would love to sign you up.
