Source: United States Senator for New Jersey Bob Menendez
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, today joined MSNBC’s José Díaz-Balart Reports live where he spoke about his questioning yesterday of Daniel Werfel, the Biden Administration nominee for IRS Commissioner, and spoke about his efforts to improve customer service at the federal agency.
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“Well, he seems to be a well-qualified candidate, seems to understand the nature . . . one of the things that I drive, that I led eight letters with colleagues, is to get the IRS to do the basics—to answer the phone, answer the mail, send out a refund in a timely manner. This is what the American people expect at a minimum. And for too long, if you are a taxpayer and you are calling the IRS hotline to figure out an answer to a question, you wouldn’t get an answer. So we are now up, as a result of my efforts and others, to where the IRS is answering 90 percent of all of the calls. We want to continue that performance and make it even better, and we also want to make sure that we have an IRS that can be responsive to the American taxpayer, and so that was the focus of the questions and I think the nominee answered them pretty well all in all,” said Sen. Menendez.
Sen. Menendez has been a leading voice in oversight efforts to ensure the IRS would address persistent customer service issues and extensive processing backlogs plaguing the agency. Last August, the Senator led more than 90 Senate and House colleagues urging then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig to eliminate the ongoing, unprecedented processing delays, extend the suspension of automated notices and collections, and continue making maximum use of overtime and surge teams. Last summer, the Senator led a group of colleagues calling on the agency to extend the filing deadline for filers with individual taxpayer identification numbers (ITIN) impacted by massive processing delays at the agency and who were as a result unable to file for the enhanced child tax credit (CTC).
Last spring during a Finance Committee Oversight hearing, Sen. Menendez questioned then-IRS Commissioner Rettig about two of the primary issues contributing to the massive backlogs at the IRS: issues with hiring workers to answer the phones and lack of technology that can allow workers to process returns faster. Before this hearing in March 2022,Sen. Menendez led more than 100 Senate and House colleagues in a bicameral, bipartisan effort to press then-Commissioner Rettig for the IRS’s lack of a comprehensive plan to remedy the numerous problems affecting taxpayers during last year’s tax filing season.
The Senator also led another bicameral effort with 45 colleagues last February that ultimately resulted in the IRS announcing the formation of a second surge team to help address the massive backlogs and continue to improve customer service. In late January 2022, Sens. Menendez led more than 200 colleagues in a bipartisan and bicameral letter calling on the IRS to provide penalty relief for taxpayers – spurring the agency to temporarily halt a number of the penalty notifications while the agency worked to address its persistent processing and customer service issues.
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