It should be noted that any views and opinions expressed in other posts on this blog are all my own individual views and opinions in my personal capacity and do not reflect the views or opinions of my employer. This post is intended to separately, on this convenient forum, promote this podcast and does not advance any view or opinion.
I recently had the honor of being asked to host the Tax Justice Warriors podcast. My colleague, William Schmidt asked me to take over this podcast after he left Legal Aid of Western Missouri to work at the IRS Office of Chief Counsel. I previously appeared on the podcast before as a guest and I enjoyed the podcast so much over the years as I learned much as a young, new tax practitioner.
I already recorded and published my first two episodes (a third episode is coming soon!) I could not have done this without my best friend, our podcast producer Zac Harvey, a digital media professional. Zac also took the picture seen here and designed our wonderful new logo. I am so grateful for Zac.
My first two episodes are both interviews that were originally recorded at tax conferences and are both interviews with National Taxpayer Advocates. The first episode is an interview with the current National Taxpayer Advocate, Erin Collins, at the Annual Low Income Taxpayer Clinic Conference in Phoenix in December 2022. Since Collins and I spoke at this conference, there are updates to some of the items we discussed.
Those updates include that President Biden has since signed into law legislation that temporarily increased the maximum low income taxpayer clinic grant to $200,000, from the $100,000 level the grant had been at for decades. Further, Lily Batchelder, the Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy at the U.S. Treausry Department, informed practitioners recently, at the ABA Tax Section conference in San Diego in February 2023, that we have now gone from roughly 85% of phone calls to live IRS agents being gone unanswered in 2022 to now 85% of such calls being answered. With the hiring of at least 5,000 new IRS employees due to $80 billion in additional funding for the IRS from the Inflation Reduction Act, the experiences of taxpayers and practitioners on the phone may improve. Overall though, this conversation between Collins and I included many topics that she utlimately addressed in her Annual Report to Congress she released shortly after this conversation.
The second episode I published here is an interview I did with former National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson and ABA Tax Section Christine A. Brunswick Public Service Fellow Anna Gooch, an attorney at the Center for Taxpayer Rights (CTR), an organization led by Olson. We discussed the work Olson and Gooch are doing at the CTR and about the focus of Anna's Brunswick fellowship.
I am so excited about this opportunity here to host this podcast. I hope you will subscribe to this podcast and I am eager to publish more episodes soon.
