IRS has given National Taxpayer Advocate, an independent division within the agency, additional powers to resolve taxpayer issues. NTA resolves taxpayer issues that haven't been solved through normal channels at the agency. Hopefully the additional authority would produce more satisfactory results for the taxpayers.
No longer will the employees of the NTA have to refer the cases back to other parts of the IRS to complete the transaction. They will have the authority to fully resolve the cases, that way not only saving time and money for the taxpayer but also for the IRS. Taxpayers will have less to complain about when only one division is involved whose employees take the time to find out about their issues and then resolve them. Usually the reason things take too long to be taken care of involves too many people at the helm. In the IRS’ case, it was too many divisions. This will no longer be the case.
This step was taken after reviewing the recommendations of the task force, created last year to review the functionality of the NTA and if it should be given additional authority in taxpayer issues. Another program that was given the go ahead was the authority to issue direct taxpayer assistance orders. These orders can be used to review decisions against an individual taxpayer in a case. NTA can issue these orders to IRS units working on taxpayer cases.
