Get ready for a swarm of incompetence at the IRS in 2023
The Internal Revenue Service is hiring 87,000 new agents, but taxpayers will not feel the pain for another two to three years. That’s how long it will take the agency to hire and train agents. Few have discussed the extent of this pain. Still, it’s something to think about when you consider the majority of coming audits will be conducted by new agents, many of whom will have been hastily hired and operating with minimal supervision.
Playing the audit lottery will not be smart in future tax years. Taxpayers should protect themselves now, especially when profiting from statutory gray areas — such as cryptocurrency staking, investing through decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and other decentralized finance (DeFi) products.
When I started my career in the mid-2000s, business audits were standard, and the new agents were always the worst with which to deal. You had to explain everything in detail to them like little children, and they still would write up non-factual summaries or incorrect legal opinions. That required escalating cases for a manager to review or file an appeal. New agents were also often uber-aggressive, fighting over small changes to build a reputation for always having major tax increases in the audits they took on.
Don’t get me wrong. The IRS needs to hire agents. The situation for the last few years has been nothing short of a nightmare. Good luck reaching an agent to resolve a tax issue! In 2021, the IRS received 282 million telephone calls. Customer service representatives only answered 32 million, or 11 percent, of those calls. The IRS certainly needs to hire more staff to answer phones and resolve issues within a reasonable time.
Related: Biden is hiring 87,000 new IRS agents — and they’re
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