IRS ends most unannounced revenue officer visits

The IRS is drastically cutting back on its decades-long practice of surprising taxpayers at their homes or businesses because of concerns about the safety of employees and confusion caused by scam artists who also knock on doors, IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said Monday.

“Starting today, if someone’s ringing your doorbell, it’s extremely unlikely to be an IRS collection employee unless you made an appointment for a home visit,” Werfel said Monday during a call with reporters.

The duties of the IRS’s 2,300 unarmed revenue officers included making unannounced visits to taxpayers to resolve outstanding account balances by collecting unpaid taxes and unfiled tax returns. Going forward, the IRS will advise taxpayers through a mailed letter that they are delinquent and advise them on how to set up an appointment with a revenue officer, Werfel said.

And if the taxpayer does not respond? The IRS has a series of steps to take, all remote, but then “you start to get into a situation where a levy or a lien becomes applicable,” he said. Those can also be handled remotely, Werfel said.

Revenue officers will still make some unannounced home visits — for example, to serve a subpoena or a summons or to seize assets — but the number of those visits should drop from tens of thousands annually to a few hundred, he said. Werfel also clarified that the change does not apply to IRS criminal investigation agents.

Unannounced home visits typically involve taxpayers who are in deep debt to the government, with $110,000 being the median amount that a revenue officer is trying to recover. Collecting that money is still a priority, Werfel said.

“We are just as intent on making sure these owed debts are collected,” he said. “But in 2023 and moving forward, we believe there’s a better way to do it when you account for all the other issues that are at play in the United States today.”

The IRS received $80 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, P.L. 117-169, a figure that was cut as part of the debt ceiling deal. Congressional Republicans who want to claw back more money from the IRS also have publicly questioned home visits.

In response to a question about congressional concerns about home visits, Werfel said the visits were on the IRS’s radar before he became commissioner earlier this year and have been an ongoing concern of IRS staff and the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which represents federal employees in 34 agencies, including the IRS. But he acknowledged that the end of the visits could assuage some elected officials.

“I have heard concerns from employees, from the NTEU, and . . . questions from the public, and sometimes those questions from the public have been communicated to us through the U.S. Congress,” he said. “I do think that as a result of this policy, the issues raised by unannounced visits, including ones raised to us by the U.S. Congress, will be significantly mitigated in the future.”

The NTEU endorsed the change.

“The safety of IRS employees is of paramount importance and this decision will help protect those whose jobs have only grown more dangerous in recent years because of false, inflammatory rhetoric about the agency and its workforce,” NTEU President Tony Reardon said in a statement. “We applaud Commissioner Werfel’s quick action after hearing the safety concerns raised by NTEU leaders and IRS Field Collection employees who faced dangerous situations that put their safety at risk.” 

— To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Martha Waggoner at Martha.Waggoner@aicpa-cima.com.