The IRS has no system in place that the Taxpayer Advocate Service can leverage to help individuals resolve problems with their coronavirus emergency economic impact payments (EIPs), the national taxpayer advocate said.
“With respect to correcting the EIP payment, we’re sort of at a standstill” with the IRS, National Taxpayer Advocate Erin M. Collins said June 19 at a web conference sponsored by the New York University School of Professional Studies and CPA Academy.
According to Collins, the IRS has sent 160 million EIPs to date, “but . . . even if there’s a 1 percent error rate on 160 million, that’s 1.6 million” potential EIP problems for TAS to sort out with the IRS.
Thanks to TAS’s IT department, most of her service’s 1,200 employees at some 77 offices nationwide were working remotely within a week of the IRS’s March 27 evacuation order in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Collins said.
But Collins added that TAS relies on the IRS to help resolve both individual taxpayer cases and systemic advocacy issues, and the agency’s piecemeal reopening is hampering her office’s work.
‘A Lot in Flux’
The IRS updated its operations webpage June 18, noting a backlog of 11 million items of unopened mail, delays in paper tax return processing, and the sporadic reopening of tax agency facilities since April.
However, Collins said, “They don’t have a system in place that we, TAS, can then leverage to fix the [EIP] challenge for the taxpayer.”
For example, TAS can assist a parent who didn’t receive an EIP because they didn’t file the tax return the IRS uses to calculate the payment, Collins said. In that case, TAS helps the taxpayer file a 2019 tax return, prompting the IRS to release the payment, she added.
Yet for a parent who received their own $1,200 EIP, but not the anticipated $500 payment for their eligible child, “there’s not a process in place to fix that” through the IRS, Collins said.
“We are speaking with the IRS, and we are highly recommending that we fix these problems this year, rather than wait until the filing of the 2020 return,” Collins said. But the IRS has issues with IT, software, and policy regarding how to proceed, she noted.
“There’s a lot in flux,” Collins said. “I know [the IRS] is working on it behind the scenes. We’re kind of needling behind the scenes, saying, ‘Let’s get a process, and once we get a process we can try and get these fixed.’”
The IRS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.