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Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of EricksonTV, Curtis here with Lauren. Happy
New Year 2014! This is our first episode of 2014. I want to talk about something that
is near and dear to our hearts: the IRS. There was an article online at USA Today titled,
"IRS is lagging badly on customer service, report says." I know you, Lauren, have some
personal experience with the IRS dealings but we will talk about that in a little bit.
I want to give you some statistics. Right now, with the current report from last year,
only 61% of more than 100 million customer service calls made to the IRS were even answered.
So 39% of calls were not answered; they gave up. That's an increase to 39% unanswered calls
from 13% 10 years earlier. That's a big jump. Here's another, "About 53% of 8.4 million
letters from taxpayers seeking adjustments to their tax liability went unanswered for
more than 45 days.... A decade ago, it was 12%." Only 110,000 walk in customers physically
went to the IRS offices and were able to have their tax law questions answered, which was
685,000 fewer than just a decade ago.
Part of what's going on is the sever cuts to the IRS budget for personnel and representatives.
In 2010 there was $172 million budgeted for IRS customer service and last year there was
only $22 million. That's a big decline. And throughout the whole year, the people that
were able to get through to the IRS and actually talk to them, the average wait time was 17
minutes. So they are saying in this article that as we go through all these customer service
cuts, tax filing for this year is not going to start until January 30th. They are not
going to be accepting returns until then. They are also saying, basically, for an individual
to do their own tax return they are going to have to buy expensive software or hire
a tax preparer service.
What do we do to resolve these issues? Because I know you, Lauren, are focusing on helping
clients with the IRS matters. So how are you dealing with this? Normally we try to call
up the practitioner hotline which gets us directly to someone who can solve problems.
They don't just answer questions but they solve problems as long as things aren't in
collections yet. Now going back to the basics, how do we represent them? We have to get the
Power of Attorney. The Power of Attorney is important because it allows us to talk about
their tax matters on their behalf directly to the IRS.
What kind of results are you having with the practitioner hotline? Well in line with the
article, I've been having a lot of trouble actually getting through. But it's still much
more effective than just being an individual and trying to call the IRS. There were a couple
days last week where when I called them they said they were having technical difficulties
and they might not be able to access information, which I took as they were having technical
difficulties and weren't able to do anything. So I just gave up. Another day the hold time
was so long I didn't know what was going on. Now things seem to be calming down and I'm
actually getting answers and getting stuff solved.
So we can help clients slog through this. It's not necessarily faster for us but we
do have access to some other tools. And we can get things solved and completed. I think
that as an individual taxpayer it is very difficult to know what to ask for or how to
negotiate. One of the reasons I wanted to do this episode was because of our current
clients and newer clients that are thinking about coming on board, starting in 2014, our
fee structure moving forward is going to include all IRS matters whether it's responding by
the practitioner hotline or actually going through ad audit. So your fee structure will
include this service with no additional fees to worry about in the future and no matter
how long it takes we are going to make sure it comes to completion. I think that certainty
is a nice thing to offer people. So if you are a current or prospective client and you
have any questions about this feel free to contact Lauren or myself. Thank you for watching
this episode of EricksonTV. Bye now.