The IRS’s New Tax Portals Are a Step in the Right Direction

One of the most common ongoing frustrations that we have with the IRS - as taxpayers and tax professionals - is a lack of responsiveness and lack of transparency. With the IRS answering less than 3% of phone calls this year and taking 9+ months to respond to correspondence, any attempt at interacting with them makes me want to tear my (nonexistent) hair out.

Fortunately, there's another way. The IRS has continued to improve its online portals for individual taxpayers, and they're now functionally useful - still far from perfect, but in an anything-is-better-than-nothing kind of way it's a dramatic step up.

We encourage all of our clients to read more and sign up for an IRS Online Account at https://www.irs.gov/account. They list a number of upcoming features that I’ll believe when I see, but for now the apparent commitment to progress is commendable. You can currently use the portal to access tax records, view your balance, make payments and view your payment history, etc etc. Among the handiest new features are new options to approve and electronically sign Power of Attorney and Tax Information Authorization requests made by your Harmony team members, as well as authorizing who else is able to view your tax records.

The portal has a suite of other (mostly) helpful options you can can see a quick breakdown about on their handy one-pager. As always, if you have any questions or clarifications, don't hesitate to reach out.