Shawn is trying to make sure he gets his tax return.
The 30-year-old works as a tax examiner at the IRS in Kansas City. He has been there for just under a year, and his job involves fixing little errors people make along the way while filing their taxes, like using a nickname instead of their legal name.
The theme is chaos.
More than 75,000 IRS workers are experiencing the strains of an understaffed and underfunded federal agency. Some Americans wait months and sometimes years to resolve their taxes because of his workday struggles.
It looks like working on outdated computers, scrambling to find basic supplies, and navigating hallways full of papers for Gunn.
"We need tons and tons of help, just like you," he said of his colleagues.
The IRS has a long list of tax returns. The IRS had 6 million tax returns that had not been processed by the end of the year.
It is something that is frustrating for the IRS, according to Commissioner Chuck Rettig, who has repeatedly implored Congress for more funding. According to the Tax Policy Center, his agency's budget has shrunk by more than 20% in the last decade. Its workload has grown by 19% since 2010. That is falling on a workforce that has shrunk by savesay savesay savesay savesay savesay is falling on a workforce that has shrunk savesay savesay savesay is falling on a workforce that has shrunk savesay savesay is falling on a workforce that has shrunk savesay savesay is falling on a workforce that has shrunk savesay savesay is falling
The IRS had five million pieces of unanswered taxpayer correspondence at the end of 2020.
Collins wrote in her annual report that the IRS is buried in paper.
When he first got there, it was insane.
Imagine an office full of cubicles and then filled with hundreds of carts just everywhere, he said, referring to the three-and-a-half foot tall white carts that hold stacks of papers.
At one point, we had a lot of tax forms that we could sort, but we didn't have carts to put them on. They just sat.
The hallways were full of paper, and there was not enough room to get to your desk.
There are boxes and boxes full of paper in the warehouses, according to a Treasury official. Without carts, workers sometimes move aside multiple boxes to get to the one that contains the return they are looking for.
It is not getting better anytime soon. The IRS and taxpayers must continue to use paper-based processes because of the delayed updates to IRS IT systems.
In 2022, IRS employees should not be typing paper returns by hand.
All of that paper can result in delays.
We are in this position because we have not had the sustained sufficient multi-year investment for IT modernization necessary to improve our technology and operating systems.
A US Treasury official said that it was remarkable that the IRS was able to do as well as it did in an office structure that was decades out of date.
Insider was directed to an online resource about careers at the IRS.
If there was a lot of paper at the IRS, there was a shortage of staplers.
There are computers. The IRS uses technology that goes back to the 1960's for processing returns. The computers are reminiscent of the movie "Hackers", down to the dark green screen with white text. The Treasury official said that some computers can take up to 30 minutes to log in.
There are millions of returns hidden within the piles of papers. Some taxpayers told Insider that they were waiting on returns for loved ones who had passed away, holding up the process of both emotional and financial closure.
The mother of Vince Ashcraft died in 2019. He has been waiting for her final tax return since March 2020.
He previously told Insider that this really needs to end. It is not about money. It's about not being able to have closure with my mom's death.
Not receiving tax returns is the difference between being able to afford things like groceries and child care. The IRS will get through its backlog by the end of the year, according to the agency's chief. It would be better if services were better for them.
He said that he was doing the best he could to make that happen. We are people like you. We want to live in a country with a tax system that is easy to follow. We are in this all together.
The Treasury official said that he had spent hundreds of hours with IRS employees. They don't have the resources to do that today.
In Kansas City, workers from different departments help each other out by serving rotation in the mail room. Someone has to manually take out what is inside of the envelope, and make sure it is stamped and stapled correctly, so they can send it off to the correct department for processing.
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