IRS Commissioner John Koskinen delivered the keynote speech at the NSA Annual Convention last week and issued a strong appeal for tax preparers to tell Congress how budget cutbacks are affecting them. Koskinen said that without more funding for fiscal year 2015, services undefined including phone services undefined would be cut. He said the agency's telephone help line for taxpayers would suffer, with the number of calls being answered estimated to plunge from 70 percent this year to about 52 percent in FY 2015.
The agency asked for $12.6 billion in funding for FY 2015, but Koskinen said that level of funding will almost certainly not be provided. He urged practitioners to tell lawmakers how the cuts are affecting them. "People don't vote for me, they vote for members of Congress," Koskinen said.
Koskinen defended the IRS's recently announced voluntary continuing education program for the 2015 filing season, known as the Annual Filing Season Program, stating the numbers indicate there is a need for the competency testing. Through 2012, of 84,000 tests given in the RTRP program, Koskinen said only about 62,000 preparers passed with a grade of 74 percent or higher. "That tells me that we do need to continue our efforts to regulate unlicensed tax preparers, including our plan for a 15-hour annual education requirement," Koskinen said.
Although he emphasized the IRS would prefer to have statutory authority to regulate preparers, Koskinen disagreed with any notion that the Annual Filing Season Program is mandatory in any way.
