Millions of phone calls unanswered

Stephen Ohlemacher has an Associated Press article about the IRS:

The IRS' overloaded phone system hung up on more than eight million taxpayers this filing season as the agency, which had already seen its budget reduced, cut millions of dollars from taxpayer services to help pay to enforce President Obama's health law.
For those who weren't disconnected, only forty percent actually got through to a person. And many of those people had to wait on hold for more than thirty minutes, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said recently.
The number of disconnected callers spiked just as taxpayers were being hit with new requirements under the health law. Last year, the phone system dropped over three hundred thousand calls, Koskinen said.
For the first time, taxpayers had to report whether they had health insurance last year on their tax returns. Those who received government subsidies had to respond whether they received the correct amount. People without insurance faced fines, collected by the IRS, if they did not qualify for an exemption.
A new staff report by Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee criticized the agency's spending priorities. The report said the IRS diverted over a hundred million dollars in user fees that had been spent on customer service last year to other areas this year.
"It looks to me like you're purposely harming taxpayers," Representative Kristi Noem (a Republican from South Dakota) told Koskinen at a recent hearing.
Koskinen said the user fees were spent on computer upgrades to implement the health law as well as a new law requiring foreign banks to report information about US account holders. He said budget cuts approved by Congress left him no choice. The agency's budget has been cut by over a billion dollars since 2010. It now stands at eleven billion dollars.
"Customer service, both on the phone and in person, has been far worse than anyone would want," Koskinen told the Ways and Means oversight subcommittee. "It's simply a matter of not having enough people to answer the phones and provide service at our walk-in sites as a result of cuts to our budget."
Republicans in Congress adamantly oppose Obama's health law, so some have been working to starve the IRS of funds just as its role in implementing the law ramps up.
It won't work, Koskinen said. The IRS is required by law to help implement the health program and the foreign reporting law, leaving the agency with few other places to cut. He said the agency requested a total of six hundred million over the last two years for computer upgrades to deal with the new laws. "In both years, Congress gave us zero dollars, so we had no choice but to look elsewhere," Koskinen said. "We funded the statute that we are required to implement."
The IRS has spent more than a billion dollars implementing the health law. This year, the agency is scheduled to spend an additional half billion, the Ways and Means report said.
Each year, millions of Americans call the IRS with questions about filling out their tax returns. Last year, forty million people called.
When too many people call at once, the IRS system hangs up on callers at the beginning of their calls, rather than have them wait on hold for an hour or more. The agency refers to these hang-ups as "courtesy disconnects", according to the Ways and Means report.
Koskinen warned at the beginning of the year that phone service would suffer this year because of budget cuts. He said the agency, which has about ninety thousand employees, is down thirteen thousand workers since 2010.
Republicans in Congress have also been at odds with the IRS since 2013, when agency officials acknowledged that agents had inappropriately singled out conservative political groups for extra scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status. The controversy has sparked investigations by the Justice Department and several committees in Congress.
"As a result of the IRS' blatant misconduct, Congress significantly reduced the agency's budget," said the report by Ways and Means Republicans.
But Representative Peter Roskam (a Republican from Illinois) said Congress did not cut funding for taxpayer services. He said that decision was made by the agency. "The amount of money Congress appropriated to the IRS for taxpayer assistance was the same this year as last year, but the level of service has decreased drastically," said Roskam, who chairs the oversight subcommittee. "So what happened? The IRS made the decision to move money away from taxpayer assistance."
Roskam and other Republicans complained that the IRS spent sixty million dollars on employee bonuses last year while it was cutting customer service. The IRS also allows employees to spend nearly a half-million hours a year working on union activities while being paid by the agency, he said.

Rico says what did you expect, it's the fucking IRS...