Trump’s 2019 Budget Further Cuts IRS Funding

Posted on February 27, 2018

President Donald Trump recently released his fiscal year 2019 IRS budget request to Congress for a total of $15 billion in funding.

As you are aware, the tax code was recently overhauled with the enactment of the new tax law. The IRS is required to implement and monitor these substantial changes to the tax code.

Trump’s IRS budget request is in four parts which includes $4.16 billion for operations support programs, including IT. Within that amount, $2.29 billion is allocated for information services, an increase of $217.8 million (10.5%) above the prior year’s budget. However, the budget request for modernizing the IRS’ business systems is $178 million below the prior year’s budget.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that the IRS hardware and software is horribly antiquated and out of date. At the end of fiscal year 2017, more than 59% of the IRS’ hardware was past its useful life. 32% of the software it uses was two or more releases behind the currently available version.

Since 2010, the IRS has lost one third of its employees and has endured substantial budget cuts which, in turn, has substantially weakened its ability to provide services to taxpayers and to collect money. We feel that further weakening the IRS is not advisable, especially because the IRS is now tasked with implementing a major overhaul of the tax system. What do you think?

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