Gore Offers 200 Ideas to Get IRS ‘Off People’s Backs’

Vice President Al Gore formally unveiled more than 200 proposals Wednesday to improve the Internal Revenue Service, including a provision for “emergency tax refunds” in one business day for hardship cases and new technology to route taxpayer phone calls more efficiently.

The report also calls for rewarding IRS workers for good customer service instead of the numbers of cases processed.

The report found that current “IRS performance measures are production driven, overvalue enforcement, focus on isolated steps . . . and may inadvertently encourage unfair treatment of taxpayers.”

Gore first disclosed many of the ideas last fall, and a task force of IRS employees has compiled the recommendations into a 92-page report.

“They will help us ensure that we have an IRS that is not just taken off people’s backs but put on their side,” the vice president said.

To compile their report, “Reinventing Service at the IRS,” task force members picked the brains of front-line IRS workers and taxpayers on how to improve service at one of the government’s least popular agencies. One finding was familiar: Taxpayers want “minimum contact with the IRS.”

To that end, the IRS will drop unnecessary notices by the end of 1998, meaning the elimination of 45 million pieces of IRS mail per year.

The Clinton administration also plans to report to Congress this year on “the fairness and effectiveness of all penalties,” which is in tune with growing congressional interest.

The IRS slapped taxpayers with $18.3 billion in penalties and interest in 1996 and collected $4.4 billion of that amount.

Some Republicans suggested that Gore, a certain contender for the presidency in 2000, is trying to exploit the popular issue.

“He talked about all of this last fall. It’s hard to see what’s new here,” said Ari Fleischer, spokesman for the House Ways and Means Committee.

The committee crafted legislation, passed by the House on Nov. 5, that, in any dispute, shifts the burden of proof from the taxpayer to the IRS, protects innocent spouses from mistakes made on joint returns and creates an independent board to oversee the IRS.