IRS Head Sees Huge Task Ahead to Administer New Tax Law

The acting head of the IRS says the current tax-filing season has gone well, while acknowledging the tough challenge the cash-strapped agency faces of administering the new tax law that will affect 2019 returns.

Acting IRS Commissioner David Kautter told Congress Thursday that some 79 million refunds totaling about $226 billion have been issued as of April 6, averaging $2,900 — up $13 from last year.

Around 80 percent of returns filed claimed a refund. The final year under the "old" tax regime, 2017, has to be accounted for by taxpayers in returns by Tuesday.

The agency, pummeled for years by criticism from congressional Republicans and funding cuts, now must administer and enforce the most sweeping overhaul of the U.S. tax code in three decades.

Kautter told the Senate Finance Committee that the new law "requires extensive work by the IRS this year and next." The paperwork alone is immense: about 450 forms and instructions will have to be amended.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the panel's chairman, said the new burden falls on an agency with a history of mismanagement and taxpayer abuse that is laboring under funding and technology deficits.

"On the one hand, the IRS has made marked improvements in recent years," Hatch said. "But, on the other hand, it is an agency stuck in the past. It relies on software and core processing systems designed during the Kennedy administration. IRS employees routinely have to manually input return information into agency computers, and often require taxpayers to send information via fax machine."

More