IRS: Hey, we can't implement the tax cut unless Congress gives us more money

The deep state doesn't like being told what to do by pikers like Congress and the president of the United States. Tax cuts are hard work! You have to print new forms, learn new answer to questions and get used to things that are different from what you're used to. Time was when Congress passed a bill and the president signed it, and that was that. But in 2018, the IRS apparently sees itself as a co-equal (at least) branch of government, and wants everyone to know this dumb tax cut simply isn't going to be implemented in full unless Congress gives it a lot more money:

The Internal Revenue Service, after years of budget cuts, will have its hands full implementing the new tax law, according to the agency’s in-house public advocate. The tax agency needs to update forms, create new definitions, write regulations and field questions from taxpayers, which tend to increase when Congress passes new laws. That will be challenging for the IRS, which is planning to answer just 60% of taxpayer calls during the tax-filing season and has cut its training budget by 75% since 2009, said Nina Olson, the national taxpayer advocate. “We have already seen confusion about withholding changes, confusion about the deductibility of prepaid property taxes, and confusion about whether states can allow taxpayers to make charitable contributions in lieu of taxes as a way of permitting their residents to claim larger tax deductions,” Ms. Olson said as she released her annual report Wednesday on challenges facing taxpayers and the IRS. “With more funding, strong leadership, and a closer working relationship with Congress, I am convinced the IRS can do the job well.” It’s far from clear, however, whether Congress will provide the IRS with additional money to implement the new tax system.

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It's also far from clear why Congress can't do what it's being ordered to do with its existing budgets. The IRS already prints new forms every tax year, They may not change as much as they're going to have to change this year, but there are always updates to the tax code and there are always new publications that reflect those updates. If the IRS is suggesting that it doesn't regularly train its employees to answer questions about updates in the code, that may explain a lot about the IRS's infamous repuation in the area of customer service. And if it doesn't get a bigger budget from Congress, then it's going to have to figure out how to reprioritize the funds it has. We have a suggestion: Perhaps the IRS could defund the division formerly led by Fifth Amendment claimant Lois Lerner, which spent time and money harassing conservative organziations applying for tax-exempt status under current law. The people who were once deployed demanding that these organizations submit lists of their donors and event speakers could instead be put to work typesetting the new tax forms, and learning how to answer questions from taxpayers. That sounds like a good redeployment of funds to me. No federal agency that has been so malevolent in its use of taxpayer funding to this point has any business claiming it can't do its legitimate job unless it gets more money. The IRS has a long history of giving taxpayers no mercy in its demands they pay Uncle Sam, regardless of how this affects real people in their real lives. Let's see how the IRS handles the same thing happening to them.