The IRS released the Taxpayer First Act Report to Congress (January 2021), here. The Report covers considerable ground and, I confess, I have not studied the Report in detail. Much of it seems on quick overview to be aspirational generalities, sprinkled with some specific recommendations. I don’t know if I will really give it a detailed study in the future.
I was pointed to the Report by this practitioner summary of the report: Steve Toscher and Robert S. Horwitz, Time for Another IRS Reorganization (Tax Litigator Blog 1/24/21), here. Here is an excerpt from that article that caught my attention (bold face supplied by JAT):
The Compliance Division will be
reorganized. LB&I, SB/SE, Wage &
Investment, Exempt Organization will all be gone. Instead, there will be Criminal
Investigation, Whistleblower, Exam and Collection. Exam will consolidate all exam operations
that are currently spread among several units and Collection will be
responsible for collection activities from all types of taxpayers (or as the
report puts it, “all taxpayer segments”).
This is a similar structure to the one that existed for over 40 years
before the 1998 restructuring act, i.e., an Examination Division, a Collection
Division and a Criminal Investigation Division.
The new “org chart” is here.
I suppose this is like “déjà vu all over again.” (Attributed to Yogi Berra per Wikipedia, here.)
So, one might fairly ask why did the IRS restructure 20 years ago? The answer is politics. Readers wanting that history (or at least my version of that history) can see it in my book, Federal Tax Procedure 2020 (Practitioner Ed.), beginning on p. 34, here.
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