With just a little time left of our time with Chuck Rettig in the commissioner seat of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and its newly inflated budget, it does not seem likely that President Biden will appoint a new commissioner prior to the midterm elections.
The IRS budget was injected with $80 billion dollars of new funds earlier this year, and the agency now will be missing a leader at the helm. Without an appointment in the coming weeks, it seems imminent that an interim commissioner will need to be established.
The role has now become politicized as both parties vie to establish the new leader of the hefty budget put into place, thus controlling the direction of the agency over the coming months.
The increased funds will require significantly increased planning, hiring and implementation. The next year will really set a foundation of what’s to come out of the agency in the future, and it’s less than ideal to have that direction come from a temporary leader.
With practitioners hopeful that the increased budget was going to begin to eliminate the woes of working with the IRS, the potential for lack of leadership and lack of direction is not promising for moving those goals forward. What it might help with is a lack of tax law changes before the end of the year.
Where typically, congress fights to put last-minute changes into place before the clock strikes twelve on Dec. 31, they may be more reluctant to push through more changes that need to be rolled out under an interim leadership with an already full plate.
A tax season without the last-minute tax law changes would be a welcome change from the last several years.
