I heard these ten points yesterday in a presentation by one of our nation’s top tax lawyers with high level IRS policy connections:

1-Companies like Amazon spend more on upgrading their computer technologies in a single year than Congress has approved for IRS for the decade.

2-IRS will follow the path set by states like New Jersey to outsource its tax debt collections.

3-IRS employees will handle larger cases with over $50,000 to debt.

4-IRS will expect an installment agreement first before discussing tax penalty relief.

5-IRS will increase pursuit of penalties against tax preparers and software companies processing self-prepared tax returns with unrealistic data through the use of AI assisted big data surveillance.

6-IRS believes that a higher level of tax compliance can be achieved by discouraging self-prepared tax returns, therefore it is ending the DirectFile program.

7-Software to detect audit risks in advance will be increasingly common for use by tax accountants, essentially the same as used by IRS to target tax returns for audits.

8-The number of IRS audits will increase.

9-IRS employees will be expected to do more with less.

10-The transition away from paper is a large issue impacting progress within IRS.