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The IRS’s First Instagram Post Was of … Flamingos

Posted on by Jason Bramwell

Are you guys following the IRS’s new Instagram page? Yeah, me neither. But we’re not 18 to 24 years old—the age group the agency is trying to target with its newest social media account.

Since it launched on Nov. 30, the IRS currently has 2,478 Instagram followers, who will find tax tips and information in graphic animation form in their feeds, in between photos of Ariana Grande promoting her latest music video and Ninja taking a photo with KISS.

And the IRS’s Instagram page is very pink.

Case in point, the IRS’s first post a few days ago that shows three flamingos in front of a pink background. The point of the post is to give Gen Zers a “heads up” to #GetReady for tax-filing season.

OK. Sure.

Then there was the agency’s second post (also with a pink background) of a chameleon changing colors, which indicates the recent changes to the tax law and how IRS Publication 5307 can better help you understand those changes.

 

In reality, I don’t think a flamingo extending its head high or a chameleon changing colors would grab the attention of a 12-year-old girl with her own Instagram account, let alone a 20-year-old who delivers Jet’s Pizza. Unless there are posts of a chimpanzee holding hundred-dollar bills and talking about how to get a bigger tax refund. Twenty-somethings might like that.

I’ll give the IRS credit, though, for trying something different and thinking outside its boring box to help young adults learn about taxes. The agency could have done Instagram posts of the “tax code page of the day” or “let’s see what’s in Charles Rettig’s desk drawer.”

But I wouldn’t be surprised to see the hashtag #IRSpetsofinstagram one day.

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After Coasting Through Tax Season, Some IRS Revenue Officers May Have to Start Doing Actual Work

While we’re typically not ones to speculate on the difficulty of any particular job (e.g. CEO of a Big 4 firm) the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (“TIGTA”) probably has the easiest job on Earth.

As far as we can tell, the TIGTA is responsible for criticizing the IRS on, well, pretty much everything that the Service does wrong and then the IRS agrees that they suck and promises to do better.


And if you’re going by the TIGTA website we’re more or less correct:

“TIGTA promotes the economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in the administration of the internal revenue laws. It is also committed to the prevention and detection of fraud, waste, and abuse within the IRS and related entities.”

We’re assuming that Doug Shulman probably agree with our assessment but that guy doesn’t even like pizza, so who cares what he thinks?

Anyhoo, the latest Monday Morning QBing from the TIGTA is that some of the Service’s senior revenue officers are basically sitting around with nothing to do. Web CPA reports:

Senior revenue officers at the Internal Revenue Service who are supposed to handle more complicated tax cases oftentimes don’t receive any work assignments, according to a new government report…

The relative lack of work for the senior revenue officers to do occurred because there is no systemic means for IRS managers to identify the most complex cases, and the criteria for identifying complex cases are subjective and inconsistently interpreted.

So you’re a senior revenue officer with 5-6 years (?) on the job. You’ve got this gig pretty much figured out. Not only do you know the ropes, you make the fucking ropes. Your manager has suits from DC so far up their ass about collecting every dime available that they can’t see straight, so they just want you busy do anything.

You, being a reasonably lazy (and realistic) person, aren’t going to kill yourself. If you’ve got the choice of picking up a 1040 that’s hundreds of pages long versus a 1040EZ that has fewer pages that a Tony Alamo pamphlet, you’re going to pick up the 1040EZ.

Well now J. Russell George is slapping those managers around with a report deeming this unacceptable which may mean that your slacking days are over:

“I am troubled that IRS managers are not providing employees with work assignments that they are ready and able to do at a time when it is incumbent on the IRS to be as efficient and effective as possible,” said TIGTA Inspector General J. Russell George in a statement.

JRG is recommending that the IRS improve it’s methods of identifying more complex cases (that the IRS naturally agreed with). We think a tax return thickness analysis is a decent place to start.

IRS Revenue Officers Don’t Have Enough to Do [Web CPA]