Senators Warren & Markey Urge Inclusion of Taxpayer Advocate on IRS’s Taxpayer First Act Implementation Team

The following is a media release from Sen. Ed Markey and Sen Elizabeth Warren’s offices. Both were elected by voters in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to serve the state in Washington DC in the US Senate. Both are Democrats.

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WASHINGTON DC –United States Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ranking Member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protections, and Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) sent a letter to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which has assembled a team to advise on the implementation of the Taxpayer First Act of 2019 (TFA), urging the IRS to immediately add a representative from the Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS).

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TAS is a federal office that represents the voice of taxpayers at the IRS and whose work helped inform the Taxpayer First Act.

The law includes more than two dozen provisions supported or encouraged by the TAS; however, the IRS’s current TFA implementation team does not include a TAS advocate.

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“The exclusion of TAS from the core Taxpayer First Act implementation team deprives the office of crucial expertise and denies taxpayers their institutional voice in charting implementation of legislation TAS helped craft,” the lawmakers wrote. “The clearest route to bring the voice of taxpayers into the implementation of the Taxpayer First Act and to ‘get it right’ is to ensure that the Taxpayer Advocate Service is substantively involved in the implementation process.”

The lawmakers have requested that the IRS respond to their letter no later than March 5, 2020.