We welcome guest blogger Madeleine DeMeules who was a student of my clinic during the past semester. She spent time this semester working on the Clinic’s brief to the 11th Circuit in an innocent spouse case, giving her a basis for reflecting on the process and offering some ideas to the IRS about its form. The Clinic tries to comment on matters that impact low income taxpayers when the IRS offers the opportunity. I was fortunate that Madeleine had the experience from her case work to provide several comments to the IRS we hope might improve the process. Keith
The Harvard Federal Tax Clinic is a Low Income Tax Clinic (“LITC”), one of many such organizations nationwide that are sponsored by the IRS and work to serve low- and moderate-income taxpayers through individual representation as well as systemic policy work.
As a rising third-year law student with the Harvard Tax Clinic, I recently had the opportunity to work with our Clinic on an important piece of written advocacy on behalf of our clients. At the beginning of June, the Clinic submitted feedback to the IRS in response to its request for public comment on upcoming changes to IRS Form 8857. This is the form that taxpayers use to submit a request for innocent spouse relief under § 6015 of the Internal Revenue Code. In short, the innocent spouse provision of the tax code allows married taxpayers who have filed joint returns to seek relief from liability arising from the deceptive, improper, or otherwise inequitable behavior of a spouse. While there are many interesting facets to this particular type of IRS proceeding, a few in particular are worth mentioning:
- First, the Internal Revenue Code phrases the innocent spouse provision in gender neutral language (i.e., referencing “individuals” and “spouses”). However, at least 90% of § 6015 litigants are women. See Stephanie McMahon, What Innocent Spouse Relief Says About Wives and the Rest of Us, 37 Harv. J.L. & Gender 141, 149 (2014).
- Second, individuals who request innocent spouse relief may have experienced some form of abuse in their marriage, sometimes connected to the tax liability at issue.
- Third, the Taxpayer Advocate Service—an independent organization that works from within the IRS to be a voice for taxpayers—has described innocent spouse relief as one of the most frequently litigated issues within the IRS as recently as 2017.
As any one of these points demonstrates, the stakes can be high in an innocent spouse case. Coupled with the difficulties of litigating complex tax issues pro se, these high stakes make innocent spouse cases an ideal issue for LITC clinics to assist clients with. Many clinics, including ours, make innocent spouse work an important part of their docket.
read more...Significantly, LITC clinics may meet their clients at a variety of time points throughout a case. Sometimes clinics and clients encounter each other before a proceeding begins, and the clinic can help the client prepare their case from the initial filing of Form 8857. In other cases, a clinic might not meet their client until after administrative proceedings have begun, but before an appeal or Tax Court petition has been filed. From this spectrum of experience, then, clinics have the opportunity to observe and learn from their clients about what it is like to fill out IRS forms like 8857 without the aid of counsel. At seven pages long, Form 8857 is detailed; it goes without saying that completing it on one’s own is difficult. As a result, clinics are aware that the presence or absence of counsel at the outset of a case can influence a client’s eventual chances of success. This is particularly important because of the changes to the Code last year which place additional emphasis on the administrative record.
In our recent comments to the IRS, the Clinic sought to summarize what we have learned from our clients in order to give the IRS specific suggestions about how it can improve Form 8857 for the range of taxpayers that encounter this form, and in particular for those clients that must proceed pro se because clinics are unable to reach them or do not have enough capacity. We suggested five changes, two of which are summarized below to illustrate the types of concerns that our clients have, and that we believe the IRS should account for as it updates Form 8857.
1. Form 8857 should include a voicemail contact permission.
The IRS sometimes calls taxpayers with questions after they submit Form 8857, but only during restricted business hours. Currently the IRS cannot leave voicemails, so taxpayers with irregular work schedules may be missing out on contacts with the IRS that could involve clarifying questions about their submission and potentially help their case. Low- and moderate-income individuals may juggle work schedules with changing shifts, or even multiple jobs. Adding a voicemail permission to Form 8857 is a simple change that should greatly increase the ability of all taxpayers to make contact with the IRS and participate fully in their case.
2. Form 8857 should give taxpayers the option to identify as ESL and list their first or preferred language.
Currently, the IRS only offers Form 8857 in one translated format—Spanish—even though the agency has language resources, including phone interpretation, in over three hundred language and dialects. By collecting this information from taxpayers who wish to share it, the IRS will be better equipped to connect ESL taxpayers submitting Form 8857 with existing language resources. Additionally, the Clinic could find no published data about the language needs of the over 50,000 taxpayers annually who submit Form 8857. This addition to the form will allow the IRS to collect that data in a meaningful manner; at the Clinic, we hope that this data can be used in the future to make the case for translating Form 8857 into additional languages.
While we at the Clinic of course hope that our comments will encourage the IRS to adopt the specific improvements we suggested, we also hope that the IRS appreciates the people and the perspectives that we sought to represent in this comment. In 2018, LITCs around the country served over 19,000 low-income taxpayers. By participating in public comments proceedings like these, our Clinic seeks to amplify the voices of the clients that we serve. We hope that the presence of their voices in the administrative process reminds that IRS that it serves these clients too.
Over the last two weeks, George Floyd’s death has reminded our country that society does not work the way it works by happenstance. Our society is the way it is because it is built on systems—systems of race, power, and privilege that are shaped by choices and constructed to produce specific results. The tax system is no exception: it directly influences how our society thinks about and interacts with pressing topics like healthcare, marriage, immigration, and income inequality. I am heartened that Harvard’s Clinic appreciates the importance of bringing as many voices as possible to the administrative process, so that as administrative agencies like the IRS continue to shape these systems, they do so with as much knowledge as possible about the needs of the people they serve.
