Book Description

IRS and FMS should be commended for the extensive amount of work they accomplished in a short period of time to issue 86 million advance tax refund checks. While there are bound to be implementation issues in any effort of this magnitude, IRS responded to problems quickly so that only a small percentage of advance refund checks were affected. Although taxpayers experienced problems in reaching IRS by telephone, IRS probably did as good as it could considering the increased demand for assistance, the number of staff available, and the fact that the advance tax refund was a one time event that made it unrealistic to hire and train additional staff. Although this report discusses various implementation issues related to the advance tax refund program and the rate reduction credit, we are not recommending any specific corrective actions related to those issues. Because our review focused on the advance tax refund program, we have no basis for knowing whether the identified issues were unique to that program or more widespread and, not knowing that, we have no basis for recommending specific changes to IRS's policies or procedures. The various observations we identified in the prior section of this report should be useful to IRS if faced with similar challenges in the future. However, IRS staff who were involved in planning and implementing the advance tax refund program, including those aspects related to the rate reduction credit, are in an even better position than either us or TIGTA to assess IRS's performance and suggest alternative approaches for handling the challenges involved in such an effort. That kind of in-house assessment, while including the results of work done by us and TIGTA, could delve into details that we did not, such as IRS's testing of programming changes and its decision to not send notices to taxpayers reminding them of the amount of advance tax refund they received.