Even as the IRS is crying it doesn’t have enough money in its budget and is demanding more, new report has found that the tax agency diverted its budget to big raises for employees and to supporting union activities while at the same time it was cutting services to taxpayers.
Congress is considering cutting the IRS budget and with this new report showing what the agency did do with the money it has now, one can’t help but feel that the IRS deserves a budget cut because it sure as heck isn’t serving the people of the United States.
The panel found the IRS had cut customer services while continuing to hand out bonuses to employees, allowing staff to conduct union activities, failing to collect debt owed by employees of the federal government and spending over $1.2 billion on implementing ObamaCare.
Even though the IRS’s budget for taxpayer assistance remained flat from fiscal year 2014 to 2015, the level of over-the-phone customer service significantly decreased, with the agency shifting staff in customer service to focus on written correspondence instead of telephone calls. Meanwhile, the number of calls doubled in that period.
The panel found that wait times increased from 18.7 minutes to 34.4 minutes, and answered calls decreased from 6.6 million to 5.3 million.
“In January 2015, the IRS commissioner estimated that taxpayer service would decline while delays in tax refunds would increase. While the IRS commissioner has blamed this solely on budget cuts, in reality the IRS deliberately diverted resources away from taxpayer services,” the report found.
These cretins need their budget cut to the bone.
For that matter, let’s just shut it down.