new reality TV show?

Here's a delightful article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a Nobel laureate physicist from UC-Berkeley who was willing to go on the TV show "Are you smarter than a Fifth Grader," where he won a million dollars competing against fifth graders.

As my students are taking their VITA certification exams this week, I got the idea that maybe House Ways and Means Chairman Rangel and Treasury Secretary Geithner should be asked to appear on a TV show called "Are you smarter than a VITA volunteer?"

Although error rates in nationwide samples of all types of preparers (including VITA) are unacceptably high, I know some VITA volunteers who could certainly give them a run for the money on their knowledge of basic tax law that applies to ordinary Americans.

I rarely watch TV, but I think this show would make compelling viewing.

I will say this: I will be holding my VITA students to much higher standards than Chairman Rangel and Secretary Geithner have met.

Joanne Passineau, award-winning IRS employee

Our Union College VITA site is extraordinarily fortunate to have an outstanding IRS employee, Joanne Passineau, a senior tax consultant from the Albany IRS office, as our VITA site relationship manager.

Joanne is shown above receiving the much deserved Community Impact Award from the United Way of the Greater Capital District at their annual award ceremony on behalf of her entire team of outstanding IRS employees in the Albany Stakeholder, Partnerships, Education, and Communication Office (SPEC).

Joanne and her Albany team truly embody the very best of the word "Service" in the name of the Internal Revenue Service. Time and again, our IRS tax consultants have gone above and beyond the call of duty to help the volunteers at area VITA sites carry out our mission of helping low and moderate income taxpayers comply with an exceptionally complex tax law.

They have given up countless nights and weekends with their families to help us out during crunch training and filing seasons. They have given us their cell phone numbers and home phone numbers. They have tracked down missing orders for training manuals and software. They have researched tricky tax questions for us. They have helped us troubleshoot glitches in software and weird e-file error messages. They have kept us up to date about the latest changes in tax law as Congress tinkers with the tax code right up to beginning of filing season, and sometimes even in the middle of filing season.

They have served, and they have served, and they have served!

IRS employees don't write the tax law. Congress does that.

It's the job of the IRS to carry out the tax law, to help taxpayers who want to comply with the law, and to enforce the tax law on those who don't want to comply.

Most people think of the IRS in its punitive enforcement role, and that's certainly an important role for the IRS. Human nature being what it is, there will always be a need for auditors and the criminal investigation departments of the IRS.

But it's also important to remember that the majority of Americans are law-abiding and want to comply with their tax obligations, and a critical service role for the IRS is to help those taxpayers who want to abide by the law do so in the least burdensome way possible.

VITA sites are designed to help those taxpayers who don't want to cut any corners, who want help in filing completely accurate tax returns that will secure all tax benefits to which they are legally entitled, while keeping them totally on the right side of the law.

Joanne's team at the IRS SPEC office has done an outstanding job of supporting our VITA site and many other VITA sites around the Capital District. Our college VITA site has had many superb IRS employees as our relationship managers over the years. Mary Ellen Sousie was our first IRS relationship manager, who helped my predecessor, Therese McCarty, and her students to launch the Union College VITA site back in January 2005.

I can honestly say that I would not have agreed to take over Union's VITA program in its second season if Therese had not raved so enthusiastically about Mary Ellen's terrific support. Mary Ellen was a tough act to follow, and when she was transferred to another position, I was in considerable despair. I thought to myself, "Surely, Mary Ellen was one of a kind. There couldn't possibly be another IRS employee as willing to go the extra mile as Mary Ellen was." But I have since learned that I was wrong, as we've had a long stream of outstanding IRS liaisons. Patti Faulkner, Kathy McNulty, and Joanne Passineau have all been standout rock-stars as our IRS relationship managers. Other IRS SPEC employees in the Albany office have pitched in enthusiastically and energetically whenever our officially designated liaison was out of the office on temporary duty elsewhere, for example, traveling to a military base to train VITA preparers there.



Our experiences with the Albany IRS SPEC office have put an entirely new face on the IRS (seated: Senior Tax Consultant Patricia Faulkner, Senior Tax Consultant Joanne Passineau; Standing: Senior Tax Consultant Barbara Pielo, Senior Tax Consultant Shelley Willette, Tax Consultant Kathy McNulty). They are shown above with yet another award they recently won, along with the Buffalo SPEC, the IRS SPEC Director's Choice award.

You can tell they love their jobs. Many of them are former auditors. By contrast, their current jobs are proactive and supportive. When they answer my phone calls, I can always hear the enthusiasm in their voices as they greet me, ready to tackle my latest question about the tricky bed buffalo I've encountered in a VITA taxpayer's situation.

My students and I can see clearly that the IRS mission is not just about helping to catch the bad guys after the fact. It's also about serving the vast majority of Americans who want to be the good guys to file accurate tax returns!

More on why is the IRS doing everyone's work?

Earlier today I posted Why the IRS is doing everyone's work in response to a post by Professor Maule.

Professor Maule has now pointed out a related post from Wandering Tax Pro Robert Flach that also addresses the subject of why the IRS is doing everyone else's work. Robert in turns links to another related post by Trish McIntire here.

Why so many posts on this subject right now?

Two reasons that I think they are timely.

Reason #1) The Cash for Clunkers program (which is NOT administered by the IRS) has run into a lot of problems.

New York franchised new car dealers are beginning to voice concerns over the Federal Government's inability to administer the 'Cash for Clunkers' program effectively. Many are in talks to stop offering the up to $4,500 rebate program because the government is not approving transactions and reimbursing dealers in a timely manner, according to the Greater New York Automobile Dealers Association (GNYADA), an organization which represents 450 franchised new car dealerships in metro New York.

"In many cases, dealers have shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars in rebates to consumers since the program began six weeks ago," said GNYADA president Mark Schienberg. "And only a very small percentage of that money has been paid back to the dealers, leaving these small business owners too cash strapped to continue offering consumers the discounts. Even in the best of times, carrying this much debt would cause problems, but in today's credit-strained economy, it's simply too much for the dealers to handle," added Schienberg.

Lack of reimbursement for paid-out rebates is not the only issue causing problems for dealers.

Many dealers complain that valid deals are being rejected by the government for small mistakes and typos with little or no guidance on how to correct the paperwork problem.

Dealers can't get a "yes" or "no" answer about qualification in a timely manner from program administrators.

The government's system has rampant computer glitches which prevent dealers from applying for rebates.

Customer service phone lines often take several hours to get through.

Additionally, dealers do not know when the $3 billion allocation will run out but are expected to pass on the rebates to consumers which they may not get paid back for. GNYADA is calling on the Federal Government to initiate a real-time notification system which would alert dealers when the program is out of money.

Cash for Clunkers, I repeat, is NOT administered by the IRS--it's administered by the National Highway Safety Transportation Administration. And NHTSA clearly does not have the infrastructure or organizational capacity to run it.

NHTSA's demonstrable incompetence made me better appreciate the enormous load that the IRS routinely carries, year in and year out, in administering so many other "tax expenditure" programs.

Reason #2) Five months ago, back in March, the White House announced--with much funfare--that President Obama was appointing the eminent and accomplished Paul Volcker to head a Presidential panel on Tax Reform. They were supposed to work fast and submit a report in early December.

According to a recent news story, that panel has shown no visible signs of progress, and Congressional leaders, including House Ways and Means Chairman Rangel, appear to be dismissing the panel's mission.

The Tax Reform Task Force President Obama created in March has yet to schedule any public meetings but does not plan on asking for an extension of its early-December deadline for filing a report, according to an administration official.

The task force is led by Paul Volcker, chairman of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, and Austan Goolsbee, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and PERAB's staff director. Goolsbee recently told an Internal Revenue Service Research Conference that the task force members are still in the information-gathering stage.

Despite the panel's lack of public activity, interested parties around Washington, D.C., have recently expressed some strong thoughts about it, with congressional tax writers expressing skepticism and seeking to reassert their jurisdiction and lobbyists calling it unnecessary.

There was a similar bipartisan presidential panel that did a lot of good work four years ago--Congress let that report gather dust as well. The official government website for that 2005 report has disappeared, but you can still read it in the Tax Policy Center's archives here.

Professor Maule thinks all members of Congress should be required to do their own taxes, because then they'd see the need for simplification.

I'd go a step farther:

All members of Congress who serve on the House Ways and Means Committee or the Senate Finance Committee as well as the Commissioner of Internal Revenue and the Secretary of the Treasury should annually take and pass the VITA volunteer tax preparer certification test and then volunteer a few hours each year at a VITA site preparing and explaining tax returns to a random cross-section of low-income working families and senior citizens.