Rossotti Again Draws Attention To Dwindling IRS Resources

by Mike Godfrey, Tax-News.com, Washington

31 October 2002

Speaking at a conference sponsored by the American Institute for Certified Public Accountants on Tuesday, outgoing IRS Commissioner, Charles Rossotti warned again that the gap between the dwindling resources afforded to the Internal Revenue Service, and the increasing demands on those resources cannot continue to widen forever.

Reporting on the conference, Reuters quoted Rossotti, whose term as IRS Commissioner is set to end in November, as observing that: 'I don't think this is a crisis this minute. It's not like the tax system is going to collapse tomorrow.' However, he added that: 'These divergent trends simply cannot continue indefinitely. It's not going to be possible for the tax system to be stable if those trends continue, so something has to turn around.'

The tax agency chief revealed that despite an increased emphasis on customer service of recent years, coupled with a larger population of potential taxpayers, the IRS actually has 10,000 fewer employees than 10 years ago, making it very difficult to deal with the large numbers of US citizens who choose not to file their tax returns.

Although, according to Reuters, Rossotti stated that simplifying the US tax code and modernising the computer network would go some way towards decreasing the agency's burden, he predicted that:

'I think it's going to be necessary for the IRS to have some level of increased resources over the next period of time to avoid this gap getting any bigger and hopefully close.'

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