For months, we've been hearing how bad tax season will be this year. Not just for you poor tax people, but for — gasp — taxpayers, even.
See our post in November of last year:
The Internal Revenue Service is gearing up to be hated even more than usual due to a “miserable” tax filing season, [IRS Commisioner John Koskinen] warned. That’s because of a lack of funding from Congress combined with increased responsibilities.
The 2015 tax filing season “will be one of the most complicated filing seasons we’ve ever had,” IRS Commissioner John Koskinen warned at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) National Tax Conference in Washington, DC Thursday. “All we can do is try to maximize our services as well as we can; as well as we can is still going to be miserable. You really do get what you pay for.”
See also, this from the New York Times earlier this month:
Services to taxpayers are likely to drop to their worst levels since 2001, when the Internal Revenue Service first started measuring its performance, the agency’s taxpayer advocate said in her annual report released on Wednesday.
Five years of budget-cutting have “brought about a devastating erosion of taxpayer service, harming taxpayers individually and collectively,” wrote Nina E. Olson, who leads the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent office within the I.R.S.
Ms. Olson warned that in this fiscal year — as filing requirements mandated by the Affordable Care Act go into effect — the agency might end up answering as few as 43 percent of the more than 100 million phone calls it expects to receive from taxpayers.
Well, today the worst tax season ever kicks off. We'll be here for you throughout, and if you need to vent or cry or freak out, just reach out and give us a holla. Seriously, I'm up at weird hours and you can even call me and just cry your ass off. I can't guarantee I'll pick up but hey, offer is out there. For those of you in the Mid-Atlantic/Old South, you can even come to my apartment and pet some kittens if you're feeling the pain. Kittens make everything better.
Hang in there, guys (and gals). It'll be over soon.
