Don't Mess With Taxes

As a member of the Taxpayer Advocacy Panel, I'm pleased to report that we have officially released our 2007 annual report.

In addition to summarizing TAP's activities and recommendations during 2007 to improve IRS service and customer satisfaction, the report includes a five-year retrospective on Panel activities and an update on the status of more than three hundred recommendations made since the first TAP met in 2002.

Last year, my 99 other TAP members and I sent the IRS 59 new recommendations on ways we believe the agency can improve its services to all taxpayers.

Area Committees, which represent seven geographic regions across the country (Texas is in Area 5), typically get comments directly from taxpayers and tax preparers. Among the grassroots issues we sent to the IRS were ways to help reduce the rejections of e-filed returns that contained data from taxpayers with multiple last names and suggestions on how to better alert taxpayers as to where they can obtain forms and publications during the filing season.

As for that last one, even with IRS.gov enhancements, finding material is still not as easy as you might think.

We also have Issue Committees on TAP which work directly with IRS business units to iron out problems in particular service areas. The Volunteer Return Preparation Program got a lot of attention here, along with the regular reviewing of IRS notices and publications for readability and usability. Don't laugh! We are trying!

The full 2007 TAP Annual Report is available online. This TAP Web page has links to the latest tome and its supplemental documents, as well as to prior year reports. Check it out and if you have some ideas you'd like to share about how to make the IRS more responsive to you and me, please pass them along.

Personal report note: This year, in addition to my Area and Issue Committee duties, I also was nagged into honored to be asked to help put the annual report together.

No, that's not why my picture is included in the document. I argued vociferously against that, but was overruled.

And no, I'm not telling you which page it's on. If you're interested, you'll just have to electronically thumb through all 108 PDF pages yourself!

Seriously, though, I'm proud of the document. As anyone who's ever worked on such a manuscript knows, the production process is a massive undertaking. In the case of the TAP report, it was even more complicated since we literally constructed it by committee and never once had a face-to-face meeting during the months-long process.

Come to think of it, maybe that was a very wise move and why we were able to get the report out a bit ahead of schedule!