The following are Questions for the Record submitted to accompany the May 20, 2025, Senate Finance Committee hearing on the nomination of former Representative Billy Long to serve as Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service.
Taxpayer Service & IRA Funding Oversight
Despite the IRS’s $80 billion funding boost under the Inflation Reduction Act, the GAO reports that phone service metrics are still worse than pre-pandemic years, and the Taxpayer Advocate warns that the IRS uses a faulty metric that overstates the level of service provided to taxpayers for assistance via the phone. What will you do differently to ensure taxpayers see real improvement in service?
As of September 30, the IRS had spent just $9 billion of the $57.8 billion in Inflation Reduction Act funds remaining after partial rescission—and nearly all of the supplemental funding for taxpayer services and technology modernization will be depleted by 2026. Meanwhile, tens of billions in enforcement funding remain untouched or frozen. Would you support legislation to authorize a reallocation of unspent IRA funds toward critical needs like taxpayer service and IT modernization—especially since those are the areas most at risk of running out of funding and are critical to restoring trust in the IRS?
Modernization
The IRS has been trying to replace the outdated Individual Master File for more than a decade—and still hasn’t finished the job. That’s despite numerous deadlines and tens of millions in funding. If confirmed, how would you ensure this critical project finally gets done—and what will success look like?
The National Taxpayer Advocate has recommended that the IRS provide Congress access to IRS frontline technical personnel on granular matters involving modernization. Would you support implementation of this recommendation?
The Government Accountability Office currently lists 200 open recommendations for the IRS in various areas, including modernization, Alternative Dispute Resolution programs, and tax gap estimation methodologies. Which of these recommendations would you, as IRS Commissioner, prioritize for implementation?
The Government Accountability Office has recommended that the IRS complete a roadmap or detailed punch list of its modernization plans to allow taxpayers to annually monitor progress towards stated goals and ensure accountability. Will you commit to providing a comprehensive document outlining IRS modernization efforts in a timely fashion upon confirmation?
Taxpayer Rights
In 2016, the Obama administration revised the Internal Revenue Manual to allow Appeals Officers to routinely include IRS lawyers and compliance personnel in appeals conferences, regardless of taxpayer consent. This practice has curtailed the independence of the Independent Office as appeals. Would you support the recommendations from the National Taxpayer Advocate to preserve a firewall between IRS lawyers and the Independent Appeals officer and require taxpayer consent for IRS attorneys to be present at the Office's hearings with taxpayers?
Federal law plainly states that an IRS agent must get a supervisor’s approval for any penalties on taxpayers. That safeguard is to prevent abuse and protect taxpayer rights. The prior Administration attempted to circumvent this law by finalizing a rule that would allow agents to receive approval at any stage of the penalty process from staff not generally considered to be their supervisor. The rule also exempts several new penalties from the legal requirement. As an alternative to that legally questionable rule, what can the IRS do to improve its processes to adhere to the supervisor approval requirement?
Earlier this year, the Senate Finance Committee released a discussion draft of a legislative package known as the Taxpayer Assistance and Service Act. Can you provide your views on the most desirable and least desirable sections of this act, as currently drafted?
Given recent reductions in personnel at the National Taxpayer Advocate and the Independent Office of Appeals, what actions would you support to ensure that these two entities can fulfill their statutory and administrative obligations? For example, would you support providing the Advocate with its own legal counsel instead of detailees? Would you support repeal of 2022-19662, “Resolution of Federal Tax Controversies by the Independent Office of Appeals,” which significantly curtailed taxpayer access to appeals?
The IRS routinely allowed the National Taxpayer Advocate to hire her own counsel rather than relying on attorneys from the Office of Chief Counsel until an Obama-era decision by the Department of the Treasury ended this practice. Allowing the National Taxpayer Advocate to hire counsel independent of the IRS is a critical protection for taxpayers during the appeals process. Would you commit to restoring the National Taxpayer Advocate’s ability to hire attorneys independently?
1099-K Threshold and Compliance Burdens
The American Rescue Plan Act lowered the 1099-K Form reporting threshold from $20,000 and 200 transactions to just $600. Because of taxpayer confusion and administrative challenges at the IRS, the new threshold was delayed for two years before the IRS then decided to make up its own non-statutory threshold of $5,000 for 2024 and $2,500 for 2025. Does the IRS have the legal authority to unilaterally override a statutory reporting threshold? Shouldn’t Congress, not the IRS, set tax policy?
The IRS Oversight Board was established by the 1998 IRS Restructuring and Reform Act to provide strategic guidance on IRS transformation; however the Board has been dormant for roughly 10 years due to lack of a quorum. Do you support resurrecting the nomination process so the Board can be functional again?
Will the Commissioner commit to fulfilling the longstanding requirement under Public Law 105–206, Section 4022, by completing a study on tax complexity aimed at reducing the 7.9 billion hours Americans spend each year complying with the tax code?
National Taxpayers Union Foundation has found that the IRS has not consistently complied with the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) requirements, particularly concerning complex tax forms like the 1099-B, which lack clear estimates of time and out-of-pocket costs for taxpayers. What measures would you take to ensure full compliance with the PRA, and how would you improve the transparency and accuracy of burden estimates associated with tax form completion?
Direct File and Free File
Congress instructed the IRS to study the feasibility and cost of a direct filing tool—not to build one. Yet the Service launched a pilot program, diverted funds from enforcement and taxpayer services to keep it afloat, and, according to TIGTA and GAO, produced incomplete estimates of the costs and FTE hours devoted to this unauthorized effort. Do you agree the IRS overstepped its authority with Direct File?
Direct File is duplicative of Free File—the IRS’s longstanding partnership with the private sector to provide free filing for eligible taxpayers. Since its launch in 2003, Free File has helped more than 70 million taxpayers file returns, far surpassing the small pilot audience for Direct File. What should the IRS be doing to better promote and improve Free File, rather than build a costly and potentially intrusive government-run competitor?
Enforcement
The Tax Court noted in their annual report that their docket has hundreds of partnership conservation easement cases, and judges have reportedly said IRS lawyers are resisting settlement and trying to litigate esoteric deed language issues even though that strategy has not succeeded. Is automatically litigating 100 percent of cases on this or any other code section a good use of IRS, judicial, or taxpayer resources, and if not, why is the IRS seemingly litigating every one of these cases?
If an IRS guidance is meant to be binding on taxpayers, will you promise that it will follow the same Administrative Procedure Act notice-and-comment process that all other federal agencies must follow?
Assistance for Americans Abroad
Since 2015, the IRS has largely stopped providing in-person taxpayer assistance at select U.S. Embassies around the world. Would you support restoration of that program, (likely entailing $3–$4 million in costs annually) to provide taxpayer assistance at major embassies? Given the value of such assistance in aiding taxpayer compliance with complex tax laws, would you support provision of these resources from IRA funding earmarked for enforcement or support?