Under a GOP-backed bill expected to sail through the House of Representatives, the Internal Revenue Service would be forced to police how Americans have paid for their abortions. To ensure that taxpayers complied with the law, IRS agents would have to investigate whether certain terminated pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. And one tax expert says that the measure could even lead to questions on tax forms: Have you had an abortion? Did you keep your receipt? [MoJo]
Related Posts
IRS Filings Show This Whole ‘Rapture’ Thing Might Prove Quite Lucrative
According to their most recent IRS filings, Family Radio is almost entirely funded by donations, and brought in $18 million in contributions in 2009 alone. According to those financial documents, accountants put the total worth of Family Radio (referred to as Family Stations on its official forms) at $72 million. With those kind of financials — and controversial beliefs — it’s no wonder skeptics have accused the group of running a scam. [CNN via NetNet]
TIGTA Concerned That IRS Is Blowing Off Deaf, Mutes (and Presumably Deaf-Mutes)
The IRS sucks at a lot of things. Given.
Thankfully we have Treasury Inspector General of Tax Administration to inform us about said failures opportunities for improvement.
But today’s news that the IRS isn’t doing enough to help our hearing and speech-impaired friends is especially disheartening to the TIGTA overlords. They can (somewhat) understand providing crappy service to regular Americans (try reading the instructions people) but if you’re unfortunate enough to be without speech or hearing, the IG felt obligated to point out the IRS’s shortcomings:
TIGTA performed an audit to evaluate both the IRS’s customer service toll-free telephone access during the 2010 Filing Season and the access and service it provided to hearing and speech-impaired taxpayers. TIGTA found that the IRS exceeded its overall performance measurement goals by 2.3 percent. However, the Level of Service for the TTY/TDD toll-free telephone line for the 2010 Filing Season was just 8.8 percent, meaning that only 8.8 percent of calls placed using the TTY/TTD successfully reached an IRS assistor. The total dialed attempts for the TTY/TDD product line during the 2010 Filing Season were more than 350,000; however, IRS assistors answered only 339 of those calls.
“Our report found that far too few hearing and speech-impaired taxpayers successfully reached an IRS assistor,” said J. Russell George, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. “The IRS must do a better job of ensuring that all Americans have equal access to its services,” he said.
Actually, that is pretty shitty service. Even by IRS standards.
The IRS Could Improve Toll-Free Telephone Assistance For Hearing and Speech-Impaired Taxpayers [TIGTA]
22.4 Million Unanswered Calls Isn’t Really That Many
Customer satisfaction is a tough business. Especially when you’re dealing with impatient masses that need that tax refund NOW, so that they don’t miss an installment on a home equity line of credit.
Unfortunately, the IRS wasn’t able to answer 22.4 million calls for this past filing season. This was during normal business hours and were for various reasons including, “the taxpayers hung up, were courtesy disconnected by the IRS, or received a busy signal.” We’d be interested in the ‘courtesy disconnected’ calls as we’re guessing that it some of the calls may have included:
“Sir, I don’t know what the President will do regarding raising your taxes…No sir, I don’t know for an absolute fact that the President isn’t a socialist…No sir, that does not make me a socialist…Hello?”
To the Service’s credit, they did answer 35.8 million calls during normal business hours (still less than half, slackers) according to the report put out by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.
But the higher than expected number of calls obviously caught the Service off guard, since they must have made the terrible assumption that taxpayers would try reading the instructions prior to calling for help on the Presidential campaign contribution.
IRS Didn’t Answer 22.4 Million Taxpayer Phone Calls [TaxProf Blog]
Higher Than Planned Call Demand Reduced Toll-Free Telephone Access for the 2009 Filing Season [TIGTA Report]