The Taxpayer Advocate Service is your voice at the IRS
When it comes to something as important and complicated as your taxes, it’s helpful to know there’s someone looking out for you.
The Taxpayer Advocate Service is an independent organization inside the IRS, dedicated to protecting your rights as a taxpayer — helping you solve problems you may be having with the IRS and trying to prevent those problems from happening again (or from ever happening in the first place).
How do we help with your problems?
Maybe you’ve been trying for months or years to resolve a problem with the IRS and have been shuffled around or can’t get the IRS to respond at all.
These aren’t merely minor delays or annoyances. They’re cases where you’ve tried to fix a problem with the IRS and are simply getting nowhere. They’re the kinds of problems that cause real hardship. And these are the kinds of cases where the Taxpayer Advocate Service might be able to help.
If a case comes to the Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS, for short) and meets our case-acceptance criteria, then you work with one advocate until the case is resolved and all issues are addressed. We prioritize cases where an IRS action (or inaction) is causing a financial hardship, but we also can help when taxpayers are experiencing unreasonable systemic delays or problems. And the service is always free.
Since it stood up in 2000, TAS has assisted about 3.7 million taxpayers in resolving their problems with the IRS.
Think your tax problem qualifies? Find your local Taxpayer Advocate Service office.
How do we help with broader problems?
TAS also protects taxpayer rights by going beyond individual cases and analyzing larger issues to see how taxpayers are affected.
The IRS might plan on making a change in the way it operates, or start a new procedure. Or TAS might identify an issue with an existing policy or procedure where cases coming in from a lot of taxpayers all stem from the same root issue. As these larger systemic issues arise, TAS works with the IRS to try to resolve them.
And at the end of the year, the National Taxpayer Advocate submits a report to Congress. In it, she is required to identify at least 20 of the most serious problems facing taxpayers. She also makes specific recommendations to Congress and the IRS to resolve those problems.
In the National Taxpayer Advocate’s 2015 year-end report, some of the issues addressed are changes to the way the IRS will operate in the future, changes to fees taxpayers pay, how an organization becomes tax exempt, and the ways the Affordable Care Act is being administered. By identifying these kinds of issues, the National Taxpayer Advocate draws the IRS’s and Congress’s attention, and prompts them to take action.
This year, we’ve brought parts of the report to Medium — you can read the Preface by National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson. You can also take a look at highlights and read the full report online.
