by Maisie Allison
Elizabeth Dwoskin profiles Nina Olson, the director of the Taxpayer Advocate Service, who negotiates the IRS's "hall of mirrors" from within. What she's up against:
In 2006 the IRS studied 46,000 audits of taxpayers. Among those returns that were flagged for misreporting income, IRS auditors reported 67 percent of the problems were unintentional errors; 27 percent were computational errors either caused by the IRS or the filer; and 3 percent of mistakes were intentional. Olson helps them all, even the ones who aren’t entirely innocent. “You take your taxpayers as you find them,” she says.
The errors aren't entirely the IRS's fault:
Congress is … making the tax code more complicated every day: In 2010, lawmakers voted in 579 changes to the code. Right now it tops out at 3.8 million words, four times as long as War and Peace. The IRS doesn’t have the manpower to manage the scads of credits and changes to the code it is required to enforce. And computer glitches are entangling more people in audits than ever before—millions in just this year.
The Dish 