Open Recommendations

The Chief Information Officer should ensure that non-tax paper forms requiring one or more signatures are digitally converted and integrated with e-Signature Services capability by the established time frames.

The Chief Information Officer should ensure that the DMAF project application representative and DIRA project facilitator work together to reconcile and validate risk assessment documentation between DMAF project releases.

The Chief Privacy Officer should review the 1,334 individual taxpayer accounts and if warranted, take appropriate actions to place the data breach indicator on tax accounts and mail notification letters to additional taxpayers affected by the data breach.

The Chief Privacy Officer should continue working to identify all individual and business taxpayers impacted by the unauthorized disclosure. If warranted, take appropriate actions to place the data breach indicator on tax accounts and mail notification letters to additional taxpayers affected by the data breach.

The Chief Tax Compliance Officer should require the SB/SE and LB&I Divisions’ Commissioners, in partnership with the Chief Data and Analytics Officer, where appropriate, to use governance processes to ensure that examination performance results are
part of the monitoring and continuous refinement of AI classification (deployed) and return selection models (if deployed).

The Chief Tax Compliance Officer should require SB/SE and LB&I Divisions’ Commissioners, in partnership with the Chief Data and Analytics Officer, to refine AI models discussed in this report by incorporating ensemble machine-learning when appropriate.

The Chief Tax Compliance Officer should require SB/SE and LB&I Divisions’ Commissioners, in partnership with the Chief Data and Analytics Officer where appropriate, to establish a measurement plan with appropriate metrics to monitor the Form 1040 return
classification and LAR and LPC models to ensure that they are achieving the expected benefits and correct any model drifts.

The Commissioner, TE/GE Division, should share this report and recommendation with the Department of the Treasury Office of Tax Policy to consider a legislative proposal to amend I.R.C. § 501 and any other required provisions of law to clearly and specifically define community benefit, including the level of services and activities that are sufficient to meet the community benefit standard in the current industry.

The Commissioner, TE/GE Division, should update processes to ensure the proper identification and review of all tax-exempt hospitals subject to a CBAR.

The Commissioner, TE/GE Division, should share this report and recommendation with the Department of the Treasury Office of Tax Policy to consider a legislative proposal to amend I.R.C. § 501 and any other required provisions of law to establish baseline criteria for tax-exempt hospital FAP eligibility.

The Commissioner, TE/GE Division, should update guidance to include reasons for excluding dual status governmental unit and certain church-affiliated hospitals from the CBARs because they are statutorily mandated.

The Chief, Taxpayer Services Division, should define measures and
establish monitoring activities to assess its success in mitigating racial disparities related to the EITC examination selection process.

The Chief, Taxpayer Services Division, should establish a monitoring
process between the division and the enterprise level to ensure that revisions to “planned examination starts” at either level are communicated and aligned so that there is consistency when measuring actual results at both the division and enterprise levels.

The Commissioner, Taxpayer Services, should work with the Office of Tax
Policy to request additional legislative considerations that will help the IRS reduce improper
payments associated with refundable tax credits.

Conduct an analysis of the new IP PIN procedures to 1) identify the impact on taxpayer filing behavior and refundable credits claimed; 2) evaluate the number of returns selected for post-refund review; and 3) measure the dollar impact to tax
administration/improper payments.

Upon completing the analysis noted in Recommendation 2, determine if the new IP PIN procedures should be continued.

The Small Business/Self-Employed Division Director, Field Collection, should continue to identify and perform sweeps of all types, including assessments of high-risk HINF geographical areas, as well as issue-based sweeps.

The Small Business/Self-Employed Division’s Director, Field Collection, should regularly review sweeps data to identify and correct errors and ensure that it is accurate and complete before using it for management reporting.

The Small Business/Self-Employed Division’s Director, Field Collection, should capture additional information in the tracking spreadsheet so management can better assess the productivity of each sweep. This should include information such as which delinquent tax return modules were secured, whether any of the returns had tax assessments, and the results of specific collection initiatives.

The Small Business/Self-Employed Division’s Director, Field Collection, should remind all levels of management of the sweeps desk guide procedures and provide refresher training on their responsibilities in the sweeps process.

The Chief, Taxpayer Services, should develop a code that can be placed on tax accounts during tax return
************2*************************** processing to identify when a on the current year Form 5695.

The Chief, Taxpayer Services, should identify and update computer programming which prevented tax returns incorrectly claiming the Residential Clean Energy Credit from being identified by the Error Resolution program.

The Chief, Taxpayer Services, should evaluate and update computer programming to disallow the credit for qualified fuel cell property when taxpayers do not meet the minimum kilowatt usage requirement.

The Chief, Taxpayer Services, should review the 1,537 tax returns we identified that did not meet the kilowatt requirement or had a miscalculated credit and take action to recover the potential erroneously issued credit amounts.

The Chief, Taxpayer Services, should take steps to periodically identify and recover erroneously issued credits until computer programming can be implemented to correct the identified issues.