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Washington, D.C.—In a blunt report to Congress today, National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson sharply underscored the arguments that the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) has been making about the serious damage insufficient funding and staffing at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) are inflicting on the agency and on America’s taxpayers.

As Congress is working to finalize funding for the remainder of this fiscal year, Olson used her report to call, repeatedly, for additional IRS funding and personnel.

“All the numbers that should be going up—taxpayers helped, calls answered, tax issues resolved, training completed—are going down, while all the numbers that should be decreasing are rising—identity theft cases, telephone wait times, delays in answering letters,” said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley.

The IRS’s ongoing budget cuts are one of the most serious problems facing taxpayers, Olson says. Since 2010, funding and staffing have been cut by 8 percent despite a steady increase in the agency’s workload. In dollar terms, the IRS budget has been reduced by some $1 billion over the past three years, resulting in a decline of more than 8,000 employees.

The Taxpayer Advocate report repeatedly called for additional IRS staffing. Noting that 20 million calls to IRS customer service representatives (CSRs) went unanswered because the agency does not have enough employees to handle them, Olson said: “There is simply no way for the IRS to deal with this large and increasing volume of work without the funding to hire more CSRs.”

Among the serious issues identified in the Olson report:

Last year, only 61 percent of calls from taxpayers seeking assistance reached a CSR, leaving 20 million taxpayers unable to get through—that is a decline from 87 percent from a decade earlier, with half the decline occurring since 2010;

An increase in telephone wait times from 2.6 minutes a decade ago to 17.6 minutes in 2013, a jump of 86 percent, with nearly half of it occurring since 2010;

An 86 percent drop in tax law questions answered from 795,000 10 years ago to only 110,000 in the 2013 tax-filing season;

An employee training budget slashed by 87 percent, from $172 million in 2010 to $22 million in 2013.

Growth in the number of individual income tax returns from 131.4 million in fiscal 2004 to about 146 million in fiscal 2013, an increase of 11 percent. Again, a significant portion of the increase—about one-third—has occurred since fiscal 2010, when 141.2 million individual returns were filed.

The Taxpayer Advocate, who is an independent voice within the IRS, minced no words about IRS budget cuts in the name of deficit reduction. “The logic behind budget cuts simply does not apply to the funding of the IRS,” Olson said in her report.

“The IRS collected $255 for each $1 it received in appropriated fund in fiscal 2013,” she added, repeating her position that Congress should develop new procedures to fund the IRS that take into account the investment nature of the appropriation.

As she has repeatedly and strongly done in the past, President Kelley warned of the intermediate and longer-term damage that insufficient funding and staffing at the IRS risks for taxpayers and the nation.

“The IRS collects 93 percent of all government revenue, funding every other activity the government undertakes from the military to food safety,” the NTEU leader said. “Without the money collected by the IRS, government simply could not function—and that is a critically-important and timely lesson we need to pay attention to.”

NTEU is the nation’s largest independent federal union, representing 150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments.