CPA welcomes taxing issues
Want to gripe about the Internal Revenue Service?
Then Bruce Zgoda wants to hear from you.
The self-employed CPA in Clarence is a volunteer member of the national Taxpayer Advocacy Panel, an independent advisory group established by the U.S. Treasury Department to identify taxpayer issues and make suggestions to improve IRS services and customer satisfaction. As a panel member, Zgoda’s job is to listen to non-legislative complaints about the IRS and come up with recommendations for improvements.
“I’m an ear for the average taxpayer and I’m a taxpayer myself. You can come to someone like me and I’ll take that voice back” to the IRS, he said.
Taxpayers who want to vent about the IRS can meet Zgoda at 8:30 a.m., Nov. 6 at the Hyatt Regency Buffalo.
He is one of about 100 volunteers appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury Department to serve three-year terms on the panel.
Since his appointment, Zgoda said he has listened to an array of grumbles about the IRS – poor service with the toll-free IRS telephone number, for instance. Other complaints focus on IRS forms and instructions, correspendence letters and the IRS Web site.
Such complaints are heard from taxpayers around the country, said Ben Chapman, a panel member who lives in New Jersey freecreditreports.
“The IRS is committed to writing these things at a level the average person can understand, and yet, because there are so many forms and so many notices, some of them could be written better,” said Chapman, a retired CPA. “We hear that from people, that they just don’t understand what this is about.”
The panel, which is funded by the National Taxpayer Advocate, got its start in 2002 as part of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Since then, several of the suggestions made to the IRS have been implemented by the agency.
The IRS has approved a recommendation to grant a six-month extension to taxpayers rather than the four-month extension that had been in place, Chapman said.
The panel currently is working with the IRS to better safeguard taxpayers’ personal information, such as Social Security numbers, he said.
“We literally go out and do outreach and work on issues people might give us,” he said.
“We gather ideas about better customer service and we listen to the issues.”
Filed under: news by Wolf