The IRS deliberately cut funding for customer service and then blamed the Congress

 The IRS, or more precisely IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, has blamed budget cuts (the Congress) for the agency’s poor customer service this year, but according to a new report the IRS deliberately cut its own funding for customer service.

  Here is more:

If you tried to contact the IRS with a question about your taxes this year, chances are you didn’t get a response. The IRS estimated that it would only answer 17 million of the 49 million calls received this filing season. Taxpayers lucky enough to have the IRS answer their calls waited an average of 34.4 minutes for assistance–nearly double the wait time last year (18.7 minutes).

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has blamed the IRS’s “abysmal” customer service on congressional budget cuts–funding is down $1.2 billion from its 2010 peak–but a new congressional report points the finger back at the IRS. While congressional funding for the IRS remained flat from 2014 to 2015, the IRS diverted $134 million away from customer service to other activities.

In addition to the $11 billion appropriated by Congress, the IRS takes in more than $400 million in user fees and may allocate that money as it sees fit. In 2014, the IRS allocated $183 million in user fees to its customer service budget, but allocated just $49 million in 2015–a 76 percent cut.

    So in actuality the budget was not cut, spending authorized by the Congress for 2015 was the same as it was in 2014 and yet the IRS cut its allotted money, which came from user fees, for customer service by 76%. The report claims this is due to mismanaging resources but I think it seems more like revenge.

  Could it be that the IRS wanted to make the so-called Congressional cuts (read Republican cuts) as painful as possible to the people of the United States in order to turn the people against the Congress? 

  If you remember correctly the Obama regime tried to make the government shutdown as painful as possible by targeting veterans in order to turn the American people against the Congress so there is precedent here and in fact I do believe that was probably the underlying motivation. 

Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium