IRS to end Tax Prep Walk-In Assistance in 2014

The IRS has notified its field offices that offer walk-in tax preparation assistance that the services will not be offered in 2014 due to budget cuts. The assistance centers prepared only 60,000 returns last year, and that number has dropped each year as the IRS has cut office hours and the number of appointments it has taken. Before 2002, the assistance was available to all taxpayers, but since then it has been available only to elderly, disabled, and low-income taxpayers. IRS National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson took issue with this decision in a speech to the 2013 Annual Meeting of the California Tax Bar & the California Tax Policy Conference and noted that, without assistance from the IRS, the elderly, disabled, and low-income taxpayers who rely on the free help will be forced to spend money on tax preparation. "I seem to think that preparing taxes for our citizens is a core tax administration duty, and I don't know of any [developed] country that is not doing it except the Internal Revenue Service of the United States," Olson said. "I think that's a shameful thing, and that is the new paradigm of tax administration."