Last month the National Taxpayer Advocate issued its latest report. If you are in Accounts Payable, Tax, or are an independent CPA representing business clients then there were several important items revealed by the report. Perhaps the most important is that the IRS has essentially abdicated its responsibility to provide even a modicum of assistance to 1099 filers struggling to understand the blizzard of changes made in the law over the past few years.

Let's go to the report:

"In FY 2020, the IRS received more than 100 million calls on its toll-free telephone lines. IRS employees answered only about 24 million. Taxpayers who got through waited an average of 18 minutes on hold. In recent years, the IRS has been serving fewer taxpayers in its Taxpayer Assistance Centers (TACs), and the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated that trend. The number of taxpayers the IRS has served face-to-face has declined from 4.4 million five years ago in FY 2016, to 2.3 million in FY 2019, to 1.0 million in FY 2020. "

Note that this is worse in every metric than even TY 2019's terrible service. Furthermore, the report also found that those who call the various IRS phone lines hang up either before or after they are placed in a queue for a particular phone line. This is because the IRS has fewer customer service representatives working its taxpayer assistance lines than at any point in the past five years. This virtually guarantees that if your organization has a 1099/1042-S related question there won't be an answer forthcoming.

Meanwhile, if you do get through the National Taxpayer Advocate report found that IRS training standards have slipped badly as has the experience levels of personnel as more and more have let the service. This means that if you have a 1099/1042-S question, and even if you get to talk with someone, the odds are that the answer you get may not even comply with the law. This is all a big problem. It means that if your organization is having trouble with 1099/1042-S filing questions and issues, or 1099/1042-S due diligence issues, or even seeking help trying to figure out how to get a proposed penalty notice waived, or in responding to a B-Notice, or backup withholding, TIN Matching, or any other of a number of 1099 related situations - that you can forget asking the IRS about it.

Of course we are here to help. In fact, for over a dozen years we have been providing accurate answers to our subscribers questions (and doing so in writing thus thereby helping our clients establish reasonable cause for their reporting decisions). Don't hesitate to check out our subscription options. See for yourself how we can assist you in performing your Accounts Payable or Tax related job in a much easier fashion than you have otherwise been forced by the IRS to date.