January 26, 2006 | Read Time: 1 minute
More than a third of the charities and other tax-exempt groups that call the IRS seeking help don’t get it, according to a new report by a key revenue-service official.
The toll-free help line of the IRS’s tax-exempt division replies to only 60 percent of the requests it receives, according to Nina E. Olson, the national taxpayer advocate. The advocate’s office is an independent department within the IRS that helps people resolve problems with the tax agency and reports annually to Congress.
Without help from the IRS, small charities can easily make mistakes in their tax filings, Ms. Olson said. The revenue service then fines the charities for their errors. About three-quarters of the fines levied from 1992 to 2004 — or more than $1.7-billion — were later returned by the IRS because the groups fixed their mistakes and showed that they had a good reason for making them, Ms. Olson said.
The fact that so many fines were returned suggests that many of the errors were innocent mistakes that the organizations might not have made in the first place if they had sufficient help, she said. Ms. Olson urged the tax agency to spend more money on customer service for tax-exempt organizations.
