| IRS pressed by NSA for faster refunds and responses |
The National Society of Accountants (NSA) has written to IRS commissioner Charles Rettig and leaders of Congress’s main tax committees asking the agency to speed up the refunds for 2019 and 2020 tax returns and communicate better. A recent op-ed by Rettig in the Washington Post was cited by the group in which he pleaded for more funding from Congress. But the NSA also asked for the IRS to do more with the funds it’s been receiving. NSA president Marchelle Foshee and managing director of public policy Jessica Jeane wrote: "NSA strongly agrees with the commissioner that there is, indeed, a crisis occurring involving the IRS, taxpayers and practitioners, much of which can be attributed to insufficient funding. Therefore, we strongly encourage Congress to fund the IRS more adequately and consistently. The steady increase of responsibility that Congress continues to legislatively place upon the IRS year-after-year greatly exceeds the declining and often stagnant appropriations for the agency. That said, however, the IRS must also do its part to rectify the situation. To that end, it is equally vital for the IRS to recognize its own shortcomings in communication during this ongoing crisis. Taxpayers and practitioners need the IRS to be more transparent and forthright about the status of its operations. Reporting out that the agency is ‘caught up on mail,’ for example, does not equate to such correspondence being processed and resolved. And while providing general backlog estimates may help paint a picture of the problem, it shines little to no light on taxpayers’ specific concerns.”
