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Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to the Common Bridge. We've got a great topic for you today. It's all about taxes and the IRS and with us today, two experts from Plante Moran. Welcome, Rachel Keller and Brett Bissonnette, welcome to the Common Bridge. The Common Bridge, of course, is available@substack.com. Please go to substack.com. Enter the Common Bridge in your search engine. Subscribe if you wish, either a paid subscription or a free subscription. Of course, the Common Bridge is available on all of your podcast outlets. Look for us there and on YouTube TV. And of course, with our friends over at Mission Control radio on your radio garden app. We all listen to debates and commentary about law and policy and especially taxes. And every law, every policy and of course tax regulation require mechanisms to ensure compliance. Well, our President Joseph R. Biden has stated that the IRS needs to be properly funded in order to carry out its mission on our very complex tax code. Taxpayers have been puzzled by missing records, slow refund late fees for things they paid and other matters including slowness in the support that they get directly from the IRS. So today, we're going to chat with these two experts who are in the field today actively advising people from all stripes about tax law and tax regulation. They spent a lot of their time interacting with the IRS and making sure that their clients are in compliance with the tax law. So we anticipate some education and maybe some policy ideas. From Plante Moran, we welcome Rachel Keller and Brett Bissonnette-- welcome to the Common Bridge.
Rachel Keller
Thanks for having us, Rich.
Richard Helppie
So Brett, our audience likes to know a little bit about our guests. So if you don't mind, maybe a little biographical sketch on you. Where'd you spend your early days? What was your academic preparation? What's your professional career been and what are you up to today?
Brett Bissonette
live in the state of Michigan born and raised here in Michigan, have a bachelor's degree in accounting have been licensed as a certified public accountant since the year 2000. went to law school at Ohio Northern University got a degree there in 2003 have been a practicing attorney since 2003. As well also have a lot of tax masters of tax law from New York University and spent five years as an adjunct tax law professor a professor at the University of Dayton. So I've I've had the the unique experience of both practicing law and practicing accounting. As far as me me personally, I live in in Davis in Michigan with my wife, Crystal and I have a son, Ryan, who is just going to be starting high school next week.
Richard Helppie
Rachel Keller from Plante Moran, tell us a little bit about yourself where were some of your early days, your academic preparation, a little bit about your professional work and what your job is today?
Rachel Keller
Sure, Thanks, Rich. I grew up in a one traffic light, small town by the name of Leonard Michigan. When I was done residing in this small town, I went to a very big university at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where I got my Bachelor's of Business Administration. I had a very passionate professor of tax in my junior year, which is what inspired me to do internships in tax and then ultimately apply for the Masters of accounting program at the University of Notre Dame, which is where I did my grad school work with a specialization specifically in tax. I have been with plant Moran since I finished my education. So this month actually is my 22 year anniversary with the firm. We are very industry focused. So roughly 80% of my client work is in the professional service space, which then comes with a very heavy federal and state and local tax background. And then the remaining 20% of my book of business is high net worth individual plannings for the individuals and their family. From an interesting fact perspective. That's what we always ask our interns in New Starts to say at orientation. My fun fact. I've run the Boston Marathon twice. I would say at this point it was a lifetime ago, but I did in fact do that. And then I'm into Harley's I own two and I'm part of an all women's riding club.
Richard Helppie
Fantastic. Look, you both been out this professionally For many years, what's different about today's environments versus past times? And you guys can follow this back and forth however you wish?
Rachel Keller
Sure, yeah, I'll start if that's okay with you rich, I would say, a couple of things. Speed of work is different. I think we can probably say that in all aspects of our lives in general with technology and instant messaging and sort of the expectation of immediate response. But there's been an increased speed in the tax profession as well. Like I said, my 22 year anniversary with the firm is this year, I would say the first 18 to 19 years of my career, we were dealing with one set of rules that you learned them, you implemented them, you got smarter at them, but you kind of continued to evolve around a set of rules that had been in existence for some time. And then when the pandemic hit, I would argue we, we pivoted to this sort of immediately effective or retroactively effective law passing at a moment in time, where we're expected to be the experts. And you can read that new legislation rich the same day that we as professionals are reading it. So we've we've been, I think, drinking a bet from a firehose from a profession, in catching up on new rules and trying to help clients find opportunities and adapt as quickly as possible. And then of course, and I'll let Brett speak to this a bit, but some of the challenges with the IRS and the understaffing issues that our clients are facing on an on a daily basis. Right.
Richard Helppie
What do you think has been different from pastimes talked about the speed and the complexity and the IRS not being able to keep up?
Brett Bissonette
Sure. So one of my roles that plant Moran has is I lead the tax controversy practice, which deals with IRS exams, IRS notice responses, that type of thing. And to echo what what Rachel said, it's the complexity that has gotten so much deeper than it ever was before. Congress puts a new new laws and rules that don't have a lot of historic background to them. And everyone is left to try to figure out what they mean or what they could mean. And so there's a lot of variability there that has to be accounted for. As far as the IRS itself goes, one of the big challenges in dealing with them is they were their business too. And they were shut down and affected by the pandemic. And even now, they are still not fully back up and running to the point where they were before the pandemic happened. So they're trying to catch up at a point where they're not even going at the same rate as they were before, which just makes things worse.
Richard Helppie
The President said that that's the IRS just isn't been funded enough? And is it a matter of funding that the budget between fiscal year 2010 And 19 has been cut 20%, and that the number of people working at the IRS is down 20% It was that pandemic related or budget related or something else?
Brett Bissonette
If you really looked back at the last 30 years of the IRS, their manpower has dropped significantly. So I think it's fair to say that they were really in a poor position to respond to any event, like the pandemic, to say that it can be just cured with additional funding, though, might be a challenge, because even if you hired a million new people today, those million people have to be trained. They have to learn what they're doing. And the IRS has been challenged to just finding a small fraction of those numbers of people. Well,
Richard Helppie
the bill pending in Congress right now, if I understand it correctly, would put more money $80 billion, I believe into the IRS. So should it become law? It looks like it's headed that way. Is that to play catch up? Or is that as more enforcement as some people have speculated?
Brett Bissonette
Yeah, I think that the details will will come out what I what I saw was 80,000 new IRS agents. And I don't know what that means, whether that is IRS auditors, or whether that is a combination of auditors and additional people in the service centers. Over the last several years, the IRS has cut back on the number of service centers that it has opened, which has been planned. But again, they don't have a great record right now when it comes to processing returns, which ends up in the long run creating a lot of additional work for taxpayers, tax professionals and the IRS itself.
Richard Helppie
So they kind of a Rolling Thunder where one small problem of underfunding has led to another problem and you can just imagine the backlog. These seem like results because the IRS isn't funded properly. What else are you seeing and if there was a smart way to deploy that new funding should it occur? Where in your estimation to you to think it should go
Rachel Keller
the one thing rates I was gonna say just from practical Excel grants and perspective when we talk about, you know, resources at the IRS, not just human beings with technical skills in the area that they're responsible for, because that's, that's an issue on exam. But just the technology aspect, you know, we, in my intro kind of talked about speed and how quick we are to, you know, get emails and texts and things like that the IRS from a system standpoint, is way behind. Generally speaking, you cannot email documents to auditors, or they're not allowed to receive certain content in an email. I think only recently with a pandemic, have we done more digital data transfer during audits. But I remember an exam of a client probably five to seven years ago, the first item on what they call an IDR, which is the information document request to list you get from the auditor on things that they want the taxpayer, or the tax professional to provide. The first item listed was a copy of the tax return. To which my response was, why do you not have this you selected us for audit, and we filed the tax return on behalf of the taxpayer, what they get is worse than like dos programming, it's a transcript that's just a bunch of numbers on a page. And so I'm sure Brett will have plenty of other colorful comments on where resources can go. But certainly a technology aspect is far behind sort of the rest of the universe, if you will, it reminds
Richard Helppie
me of when I was a programmer many years ago, and we were stuck with things like CPU capacity and processing speeds and storage speeds. So you got very thin presentation layers or the way you're describing it raw data dumps, versus what the rest of the world has become accustomed to, I can send a PDF document, I can receive an exact image, I can store it digitally, I can get it to you instantaneously. And most of the world other than parts of the not for profit sector, like the federal government, like health care, I can get it in an app on my phone. So that technology investment seems to make a lot of sense. I can't even imagine the size of the undertaking. But that makes sense to me. But what do you think about this? What else should we be thinking about? Or what should our listeners readers and viewers need to understand about where this investment might go?
Brett Bissonette
So the IRS has really been working in in recent years towards just beefing up the E filing side of things. And I think the the research shows that, as E filing goes, things work pretty efficiently when a return is E filed is generally accepted by the IRS in a reasonable amount of time. And there just doesn't seem to be as many issues with that return as it is when there it's paper filed. So paper filing induces an extra step in the process. Now, instead of going straight into the IRS computers, and now has to go into the hands of an individual at the IRS who has to manually key that into the IRS system.
Richard Helppie
Ouch. That's, that's, that is amazing. And you know, the thing is, when I think about the IRS is Internal Revenue Service. And as Rachel explained in her bio, she's done a lot with professional services. And I was in the professional service business for a long time. And I know about setting expectation with the client. So if we thought about IRS as a service as it is, what should people expect from the IRS and where do they excel and I we've heard a couple of areas that need to improve, but what should people expect and what are some of the strengths that IRS can build on what are some areas that they need to shore up just from
Rachel Keller
a tax payer perspective? So when I think about my clients, I I would say, advising clients plan on long waits. If we're dealing with correspondence, it's going to take months, especially now to resolve an issue. And, you know, with the hiring that's been going on, not all the auditors have the technical competence that we as perfect tax professionals would expect them to have. So you can, after waiting on hold for a very long time, get an agent on the phone and be in a dead end conversation, because they're just not skilled equipped to talk about even some of the most basic issues. So just from a tax payer perspective, having that expectation that this is unfortunately going to be a bit of a painstaking, tedious and probably longer than anyone would like process is really important to help us manage the relationship from from a client service perspective.
Brett Bissonette
Yeah, definitely. Patience is key to working with the IRS. So just another issue I've seen recently is understanding how the IRS works. And the IRS is broadly divided into two categories. There's the exam side, and the the individuals on the exam side are experts in determining what is the proper amount of tax due. And there's the collection side, which those individuals are experts in determining how do we collect those taxes. Previously, you used to be able to call the IRS and you might find an individual on the call, that might be able to help you with both sides of it, for instance, and a notice goes out from the IRS telling a taxpayer, you owe us you know, $10,000, or whatever the amount is, that's coming from the exam side. Now, it might have worked through the process far enough to get into the collection side to the to where the IRS is now looking to collect that balance. And the response back from the taxpayer may be, look, IRS, we really don't owe this and here's why. So at that point, you really need involvement from both the exam side and the collection side, we used to be able to call the IRS and speak to an individual who would have some expertise in both and be able to say, Okay, I understand the situation, I'm just going to put a collection hold on this until the exam side has a chance to work your response and clear the account. If it's warranted, it's become much more difficult to do that recently. And now we're to the point where exam will send out a notice or maybe it doesn't send out a notice. Maybe it gets lost in the mail. Who knows. But collections already up and running with it. So it takes sometimes two calls to the IRS. And sometimes that becomes part of the strategy. And resolving because with the collection rights that a taxpayer has one of those rights is that they haven't had an opportunity through the exam side, you can get to a point if the IRS is challenging or trying to engage an involuntary collection of your taxes through a bank account seizure. That's a time when you can raise the level two appeals, and have an appeals agent look at that and say, Yeah, you really don't owe the tax if that's what you're asserting. So we've substituted sometimes, appeals agents now having to do the work of people in a service center who might just have to punch in a number into their computer.
Richard Helppie
That's just astonishing what happens to a person, they need something from the IRS and they want to make this appeal. And now they're getting Dunning notices. They're getting interest and penalties, I would assume coming from the collection side of the house and maybe as their bank accounts are being frozen, what's a taxpayer to do in a situation like that.
Brett Bissonette
And it really depends on the circumstances. One Agency that can be helpful is the Taxpayer Advocate Service. And that is a branch of the IRS that is actually responsible for answering to Congress and not to be the executive branch. They will frequently get in get involved, they have certain criteria. They can be very wonderful to work with, they can act as a liaison with the IRS itself. In some circumstances, they can substitute their judgment for the judgment of the IRS itself and the processing centers. And sometimes that can be done sometimes it's a matter of working through the process. And sometimes it's just a matter of, of waiting because going going to appeals is not a quick solution. Anyway, when it comes to information that might be needed from the IRS, there is the ability to go through a Freedom of Information Act request that's been slowed down because of the pandemic. And so there's no one size fits all answer. Sometimes though. It is a problem as you know, because you'll get a notice from the IRS that will say you owe X dollars, but really no good explanation as to why so it does take some work behind the scenes some time to say A what's causing this. And in the end, it often becomes a lot more efficient to go through and retrace your steps to just document that. I've done everything right here. And you should correct your records IRS.
Richard Helppie
Yeah, it's just amazing. And almost to my lay ears, it sounds like well, to get it resolved to act of Congress or a FOIA request, when and as a layperson, I have no idea how to start up FOIA requests. Maybe I need to learn, but are there better ways than others to contact the IRS? Is it just get on the phone and wait? Or is there web services? Or I don't think there's an app or way to text or find an advisor like yourself for when those dollars can justify that? How would you tell people to go about contacting the IRS?
Rachel Keller
Rich, it's a great question. And I'll give you the standard tax answer. It depends. Depends on the issue.
Richard Helppie
You also use the F word there, which I hope was a misstatement. You said it was faxed? I mean, who faxes these days,
Rachel Keller
the IRS?
Richard Helppie
I was wondering what happened all those machines that everybody got rid of? I think we've answered that question.
Rachel Keller
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure most businesses are going the route of Plante Moran, where it's E fax, but you have to send in a sign power of attorney, authorizing someone to speak on your behalf if you're the taxpayer. most instances, what happens is we get the paperwork signed, we get on the phone and get an agent on the phone, they provide you the fax number that is at their workstation. And then you sit and wait on hold while they stand at the fax machine to collect the documents to be authorized to speak to you about the taxpayers situation.
Richard Helppie
While as you said, there's this thing called email and DocuSign modern conveniences like the PDF file. And look, there's been a lot of reports about the service problems, including refund delays, insufficient refund information online. And one report I was reading in preparation for this said that only 29% of calls for taxpayer assistance are being answered. How could that possibly be? Or is that more pandemic related?
Brett Bissonette
I think that's probably more historic. And I think the numbers I've seen more recently are lower than that.
Richard Helppie
So if I'm a taxpayer, and I need to contact the IRS and say it's been mis file, as we've been talking, I'm gonna go into a lottery where I may have one in five chances that anybody's actually going to talk to me, they're even going to pick up the phone. And then another layer of whether that person has the skill set to help another layer, maybe they don't have the technology to help me, this can't be good. When we look at let's put another 80 billion into this. So from listening to you, too, it sounds like there are a lot of issues going on. And then the pandemic response, really just crush things. Am I getting close to that?
Brett Bissonette
I think that's fair. Most of the time, though. The IRS gets it right. I mean, we're talking about the outliers, and I see a lot of the outliers and Rachel you probably see fewer of the outliers but you still see a fair amount. Most of the time, particularly when it comes to E filing the IRS gets things right,
Richard Helppie
right. I didn't read one report, the IRS website was down which did impact the ability to do an E file. Have they upgraded the technology sense or maybe repaired what they had? I'm not
Brett Bissonette
sure if they have or not. I Think they have, as far as I know, things on the E filing side are going okay. Right now, last I heard one of the one of the options you have is to request a tax transcript. So a tax transcript is is just a transcript of all events that might have occurred with respect to a particular return for a taxpayer for a particular year. Historically, you know, they've taken two to four days to request sometimes you can get on the phone and get them sent over right then. I recently talked to somebody who's an intermediary who requests these these transcripts on behalf of taxpayers through authorizations. And originally we were talking about getting them in two to four days. And after my call with them, he said a check with somebody internally, and they're running about three weeks. So just overnight, one of the issues the IRS, this is what I've heard anyway, they redeployed a lot of people in response to questioning Congress, redeployed people from the customer service side in the phone lines, I took half of the resources literally overnight without telling them anybody, and move them on to the return processing side to clear some of the backlog. So right now, if you're on hold with the IRS for two hours that you get a courtesy disconnect. So you're not waiting forever, and you reenter the queue. That's gotten worse since they've they've done that
Richard Helppie
I've never thought of a disconnect, being courteous. But I guess that's that's the gut. It's the government, it doesn't need to make sense. I remember reading the reports back in January, where it was said the IRS was just buried in paperwork. And I take what you're saying is an attempt to clear that. And then I've been reading lately about something called the Free File System. And I have to profess, I don't know anything about it, could you to explain to our listeners, our readers and our viewers of the Common Bridge? What is the Free File System? How does it work? How is it supposed to work? And does it relate to anything that we've been talking about visa vie service issues,
Brett Bissonette
so at at plant Moran, we use our own software, we we have a vendor that provides that we don't use the Free File System ourselves from what I understand of the system, it is available for taxpayers to use at the IRS website and file their own tax returns. It as I understand it goes through the same e filing process. And so it would seem to be helpful from the standpoint of being a more efficient way of a taxpayer providing their information to the IRS and getting it into the IRS systems with minimal effort on on either side. The only thing I would say about that as it's not universally available, as I would understand it. So I think there are certain criteria, your income has to be below a certain level, that type of thing. I don't know if it's universally available to everyone.
Richard Helppie
I know I used to use web based apps. I can't recall the name now. But it was 18 or $25 at the time. And I know like h&r block has one. So this is kind of a replacement for that.
Brett Bissonette
I think so
Richard Helppie
let's be dangerous for a little bit. All right, let's talk about some policy ideas. Are the current tax policies just so cumbersome that they just don't make any sense in today's climate?
Brett Bissonette
I think it depends on your point of view. So the tax law, first and foremost is a tool of social engineering, we don't have a flat tax that everybody pays with the IRS, it has gone from a ideally, or at least you know, simply you have a regressive tax, which is simply everyone pays the same amount on whatever their income is, it's moved to a progressive scheme where your rates go up as your income goes up. And to further complicate things, deductions and credits are incredibly complicated. And, you know, the tax law has a way of picking winners and losers. So just on that basis, it's really hard to say what should or shouldn't be, because it all depends upon what your point of view is. And what we've seen is a lot of that depends upon the will of the party in in charge of Washington,
Richard Helppie
you know, to that point, two of them that have been addressed by each of the two past administrations, you know, providing that this bill finally becomes law, but the Trump administration kept the deduction for state and local taxes long overdue. It is only benefits extremely high income people in very high tech states, but in effect you resulted in middle class taxpayers throughout the country, subsidized Seeing extremely wealthy people in a few of the high tech states. And despite numerous attempts to undo that limitation that looks like it's going to remain the law. And then in the current bill, one more attempt to get the carried interest tax treatment back to regular income, because it is for labor versus the capital gains taxes that result from putting actually capital up. But to your point about the it depends, I've read astonishingly articulate defenses of the opposite viewpoint on both of those. And I have to say they're quite clever. But I hope that we can hold the line and get rid of the carried interest treatment tax favored treatment and continue to maintain the state and local tax cap, are there tax policies that are more misunderstood than the others in your practice, that somebody thinks they're doing the right thing, and they, they get surprised, like, Oh, I didn't know I could do that.
Rachel Keller
I was gonna say, I see a fair amount, especially in professional service space, I've got a pretty large like architect engineering construction client base, you'd be shocked those those businesses are often eligible for the research and development credit, they might not think that they are because they're not scientists and lab coats, testing DNA, for example. But a lot of their projects, the way those contracts are written, they're eligible, we've been dealing with a long standing proposed keeps getting kind of kicked down the road limitation on not the credit, but that deduction of the expenses related to generation of the credit. Right now you have the option, you have the ability to take a current deduction for the expenses, as well as as take a credit, what's proposed to happen, and technically is law today for calendar 22. Absent some extender bills at the end of the year, or something getting put into a bill that's retroactively effective. As of today, if you're doing r&d, you can still take your credit, but you need to add back and capitalize and amortize those expenses over time. For some businesses that you know, we've been talking about it and talking about it and talking about it and constantly, say, next year, next year, next year, while we're here, and when you start to run the math, there's a lot of sticker shock. And wow, this is really impactful to my quarterly estimates, we've got businesses technically that are probably underpaid on estimates at the moment, because they've not been adding that back. But on the flip side, they don't want to outlay the cash because there could be a change in law that's retroactive. And so I think there's a lot of importance to being strategic and planning and having conversations with your tax professionals. Because we are in this constant changing sort of ever, ever existing Limbo land, for lack of a better term.
Richard Helppie
Are there any laws or pending legislation that you like to see passed? I know that I like the idea of the Child Tax Credit. But in your practice, do you ever get frustrated and say, You know what, that legislation doesn't belong here, or we need a regulation that does X, Y, or Z.
Brett Bissonette
So there's a lot of different proposals that have been out there to really identify an opportunity for for an individual taxpayer, it becomes a matter of looking at their current situation, there's a lot of structuring options, sometimes it's more efficient to combine taxpayers into a single business structure, those types of things from from an overall policy standpoint, it's really hard to say, but one thing I I'd like to see is just some of the complexity become reduced. And when it comes to to Washington, every time they talk about making it simpler, they end up making it more complex, there has
Richard Helppie
actually been task forces to make things more streamlined in the healthcare industry, for example, and all it does result in even more process and more collisions amongst policy. You two have been really generous with your time, first of all, and I feel like we've barely scratched the surface. But I think it's such an important topic as not being covered in what we would hope the news would be able to tell us about. You all ought to be on a cable news channel, or at least on local channels telling people about this. But we do have a growing audience at the Common Bridge now reaching several million people. And so this will be heard. So with that audience, what didn't we cover today that perhaps we should have talked about from
Brett Bissonette
a procedure standpoint, the key is to number one, remain patient with the IRS. Sometimes it does take sending several letters in another suggestion is make sure that you're getting good advice as to the proper step in the process that you're in. Because the IRS does have deadlines imposed by law, but if you miss those deadlines, you you can get to a point of no return and all Overall, the best way to deal with the IRS is not to deal with them at all. So in a perfect world, your return is submitted and everything's perfect. There's nothing that's caught by an IRS system that would generate a notice or anything that would require you to enter into this labyrinth of notice responses. And you're, you're back to just having to suffer along with everyone else with the possibility that your return might be audited, as opposed to having to risk to respond to a mistake on your return. Well,
Richard Helppie
I hope that all of our listeners readers and viewers heard that part that two really important thing that I heard was, number one, be patient. And number two, an ounce of prevention, that if you get proper counsel on the way in, you won't be dealing with audits and penalties and things on the way out or after the fact, as we kind of move to wrap up here. I'm gonna ask kind of a omnibus question, and you can take it as kind of a lightning round. But advice for our viewers, maybe if there are any policy recommendations for the IRS, so it can fulfill its mission? I mean, we do need to run the government. And then, you know, maybe any closing thoughts that that you might have? And I don't know who wants to go first, but or is yours to bring us home here?
Rachel Keller
Yeah, I'll go first. I mean, I think Brett alluded to this earlier, and it kind of indirectly, in his last comment, like using the E file system, whenever and wherever possible is, is tantamount to success. But it's not just a transmission of the return, like making sure that that the tax return itself is accurate. So there isn't a subsequent inquiry from the IRS, because once you're in that inquiry process, you're back to phone calls, paper, time delays on processing paper, that just become very cumbersome. I had another thought, but it totally escaped me. Oh, I remember now. So the the other piece of advice I would suggest is there is an online system on the IRS website for making payments for estimated taxes, balance do with return, you can make your extension payments online. Rich, when you mentioned earlier about E file system down I think it actually was the payment system, like the day before a quarterly due date, six or nine months ago where people were trying to make payments online and literally could not submit Unfortunately, however, I still would strongly encourage people use that system. You can either link to a bank account, or you can for a fee pay with a credit card. But at least your payments getting posted under your social security number. There's a data ID verification process that you go through when you go to make that payment online. Because a lot of clients still and taxpayers still mail paper checks. And if that check is literally lost in the mail. And you didn't send it certified where there's proof of receipt of timely filing, we stand in an uphill position to try to argue abatement of penalties and interest and I've got a client with that exact situation, made his extension payment did not send it certified. The IRS has not cashed his check, because it's lost somewhere maybe at a service center who knows where and he's got late payment penalties that we can't abate because we can't even provide evidence that he finally made his payment.
Richard Helppie
But Rachel good. Thank you for that insight. And we're just again, barely scratching the surface on this. But it's been a fascinating conversation. Brett, any actions that you could recommend people take or policies for the IRS or who knows maybe from a policy perspective, what's the worst thing we could do or any closing thoughts that you might have?
Brett Bissonette
One thing I'd like to see perhaps from a funding standpoint is the IRS maybe get a little bit more money to to handle appeals. Right now. The IRS they call it the IRS independent office of Appeals is the formal title to to emphasize the fact that they're not part of the IRS. They are really behind with A lot of matters to the point where it's running sometimes 12 to 18 months to have a matter heard at the IRS office of Appeals, and they really end up standing is kind of the last line of defense that the IRS before a matter goes to tax court a lot of time, their goal is to resolve issues fairly to taxpayers and to the government. But they take the view that they are looking at it from the standpoint that what is IRS council got to do with this what is tax court going to do is they consider hazards of litigation on behalf of the government too. And it would seem like if that were put into the process a little bit earlier, we might be able to clear some of that backlog and just make the process a little bit more open and friendlier to taxpayers who currently have to wait a long time to have that process resolved.
Richard Helppie
We've been talking today with Rachel Keller and Brett Bissonnette of the public accounting firm plant and Moran please look them up on their website by can adjust. They're a great firm to work with. We've been covering the IRS today and some of the challenges facing us. And so please subscribe to the Common Bridge of course@substack.com Look at the Common Bridge, consider a paid or free subscription. We're available on most podcast outlets on YouTube TV, and of course, admission control radio on your radio garden app. And so with our guests, Rachel Keller and Brett Bissonnette, this is Richard Helppie, signing off on the Common Bridge.
Transcribed by Cynthia Silveri
What's Going At The IRS?