IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told a House Appropriations Committee panel yesterday that the IRS couldn’t properly fund taxpayer services because it needed money Congress had allocated for that purpose to instead fund its newly mandated Obamacare workload. Rudy Takala noted in The Washington Examiner that:
More than eight million phone calls to the agency’s customer service line went unanswered in the last filing season. Koskinen added that the agency hasn’t fully funded customer service for the last “three or four years,” and that about $900 million had been pulled from cybersecurity.
The agency has been hit with at least two successful cyberattacks in the past year. A cyberattack last year resulted in the theft of data on 330,000 taxpayers from the agency’s “Get Transcript” database, while an attack last week resulted in the loss of special personal identification numbers associated with 101,000.
President Obama’s budget proposal for fiscal 2017 would increase funding for the IRS from $10.9 billion in 2016 to $12.2 billion in 2017, an increase of about 12 percent.
If you’re unfamiliar with Koskinen, see why House GOP members want to impeach him in the video below:
