Since tax day is almost here, let’s take another swing at the IRS, shall we?

In a recent Wall Street Journal article about how the IRS does its job, a person who has a tax preparation service in California was quoted as saying, “there are people who are getting away with horrible things on their tax returns year after year.”

Really?

Well, let’s see why.

[ad#Google Adsense 336×280-IA]The Service (funny name for what it does, isn’t it?) now answers 73% of its calls.

Amazingly, that’s twice what it answered last year.

I have to ask: How long would you have a job if you dropped 27% of incoming calls from your customers?

(At least the time you spend on hold on those phone calls has been cut to nine minutes from a high last year of 21 minutes.)

Another big problem? Identity theft is up and audits are down.

The time the Service spends auditing the largest companies has dropped 47% from the previous tax year.

And the IRS has had to pull down several of its online services because so many people are able to hack its system and pretend to be someone else.

The Journal reports that tax professionals are still complaining about an absence of published rules from which to work. How can there not be a list of tax rules? And how many years has the Service been doing this?

But, boy oh boy, can it delete emails or what?!

And a bad sign about the future of the IRS is the fact that only about 200 of its 85,000 workers are under the age of 25.

Talk about an aging group!

How about targeting conservative groups? Water under the dam, right? (Anyone who wants the truth knows that was directed from higher up and outside of the IRS.)

Or how about being able to ignore most of the rules of evidence when they go after someone?

Or the fact that they are allowed to put taxpayers – citizens – in a position where they have to prove a negative?

The IRS once told me to prove to it that I didn’t receive money! That was an actual situation I was once in.

Try to prove you didn’t get paid money an employer says he paid you. It’s about as fun as it sounds.

Just about everyone has a horror story about the taxmen, which makes the name of the elevator music you get when you’re on hold with them all the more ridiculous. It’s called “Fresh Optimism.”

I swear I am not making up any of this.

It took a brave soul to come up with that name.

But fear not, the director of the Service (I love that word “Service”) says, “The people who care most about taxpayer service turn out to be the IRS employees, who view it as their mission to help taxpayers.”

I’m sure I speak for a lot of people when I say, please stop helping us!

But maybe the best part of the Service is that in a near-zero interest rate environment where retired persons get less than 1% on their savings, the Service still charges 3% interest over the federal short-term rate on taxes owed from the due date, not from when they find the error or omission.

Just wonderful!

Thanks for all the service, and I am out of time. Pray for a flat tax.

Good investing,

Steve

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Source: Wealthy Retirement