Nationwide protests against police brutality have temporarily shuttered the IRS’s Philadelphia service center and an unknown number of other facilities, complicating many agency employees’ first days back to the office in months.
The IRS was already experiencing “unique circumstances” since starting to suspend exams and payments, close electronic services, and then close physical facilities in March in response to the coronavirus pandemic, “and more so actually in the last week,” Sunita Lough, deputy commissioner for services and enforcement, told an American Payroll Association online conference June 2.
“Unfortunately, I’m getting emails consistently today that a number of [IRS] buildings have been shut down because of protests,” Lough said, without detailing the buildings’ locations or what functions are affected.
The National Treasury Employees Union referred Tax Notes to the IRS, which said any closures attributable to protests would have minimal operational impacts because of the agency's ongoing shutdown orders.
Lough said that after reopening IRS brick-and-mortar facilities in Kentucky, Texas, and Utah the week of June 1, the agency hopes to open “three, four, five states every couple of weeks,” depending on consultations with state governors.
Lough didn’t explain how continued protests might affect IRS reopening plans.
10 Million Pieces of Mail
Speaking after the American Payroll Association panel, Chad Hooper, national president of the Professional Managers Association, told Tax Notes that civil disturbances temporarily closed the Philadelphia office, where he works as a supervisory tax analyst.
“Monday was the first day returning some employees back to Ogden [Utah], Austin [Texas], and Covington [Kentucky], and so I wouldn’t think the impact to operations was significant given the existing backlog of work,” Hooper said.
“The rest of the nation is still working with a limited number of volunteers, so any closed office would displace maybe a few hundred people,” Hooper added.
Lough told the American Payroll Association audience that the IRS has more than 10 million backlogged pieces of mail to sort, and while about 95 percent of taxpayers filed their tax returns electronically this year, that still leaves millions of paper return filers waiting for refund checks.
The IRS has already distributed $268 billion in economic impact payments to approximately 159 million individuals, Lough said.
“We’ve had issues, because [when] we need to do something that’s fast, you always have some issues that occur,” Lough said. “But they’ve been actually pretty minor compared to the extent of the payments.”