An official website of the U.S. GovThe Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS) is an independent organization within the IRS. Led by the National Taxpayer Advocate, TAS is your Voice at the IRS.
The National Taxpayer Advocate’s Annual Report to Congress identifies taxpayers’ problems and provides suggestions to further protect taxpayer rights and ease taxpayer burden.
The National Taxpayer Advocate delivers this report directly to the tax-writing committees in Congress (the House Committee on Ways and Means and the Senate Committee on Finance), with no prior review by the IRS Commissioner, the Secretary of the Treasury, or the Office of Management and Budget.
The National Taxpayer Advocate’s Preface describes many of the challenges taxpayers faced this year and offers a Taxpayer Rights and Service Assessment measuring how the agency is doing in protecting and furthering taxpayer rights and reducing taxpayer burden.
The past year has been one of extraordinary transition for the IRS. The agency began the year with its largest workforce in recent memory, and then after absorbing a 27% reduction, it ended the year with one of its smallest. Reductions of this magnitude almost surely will affect operations, particularly in areas that already depend heavily on manual work and experienced employees, such as processing correspondence, amended returns, and other account adjustments, including identity theft cases. As the IRS enters the 2026 filing season while implementing extensive changes enacted by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the agency’s challenge will be to ensure that taxpayers continue to receive timely service and fair treatment, even as it operates with fewer resources.
Taxpayers want, and deserve, a 21st century tax administration – one that provides clear communication, transparent processing timeframes, secure digital options that resolve problems, and a smooth handoff to live assistance when automation is not sufficient. The good news is that improvement is achievable. The operational gains seen in 2024 and 2025, along with Congress’s enactment of targeted bipartisan taxpayer protections, show that practical reforms can translate into better outcomes for millions of taxpayers. The task now is to make those gains durable so that service does not improve only when conditions are unusually favorable, but remains reliable through workforce constraints, major law changes, and inevitable future disruptions. That requires sustained modernization and, equally important, modern performance measurement. Success should be defined by what taxpayers deserve: timely refunds, accurate information, first-contact resolution where possible, and timely processing of cases that cannot be resolved on a phone call.
Each year’s Annual Report to Congress identifies the ten most serious problems facing taxpayers and offers recommendations to fix them. These issues can affect taxpayers’ basic rights and the ways they pay taxes or receive refunds, even if they are not involved in a dispute with the IRS. As your Voice at the IRS, the National Taxpayer Advocate uses the Annual Report to elevate these problems and recommend solutions to Congress and the highest levels of the IRS.
This section discusses the ten federal tax issues most frequently litigated during the preceding year and contains an analysis of cases petitioned in the Tax Court rather than simply decided cases, providing a much broader view of issues taxpayers bring to court.
In this section, TAS reports on its 2025 advocacy updates from its Case Advocacy and Systemic Advocacy functions.
The 2026 Purple Book presents a concise summary of 71 legislative recommendations that the National Taxpayer Advocate believes will strengthen taxpayer rights and improve tax administration. Most of the recommendations have been made in detail in prior reports, but others are presented in this book for the first time. The National Taxpayer Advocate believes that most of the recommendations presented in this volume are non-controversial, common-sense reforms that the tax-writing committees, other committees, and other members of Congress may find useful.
