In the Los Angeles Times, a business reporter has much praise for a new business whose model is to DDOS the IRS help phone lines, and then sell access to people.
I am not joking here: They plan phone banks to make a massive number of calls to the IRS help line, and then, they will sell access to clients, who will call them and be transferred to the IRS, theoretically with no wait, because the wait has been done by the service.
If you need to reach the Internal Revenue Service, your wait on hold will average about a half-hour, the tax agency says, noting that “some telephone service lines may have longer wait times.”
In fact, most calls won’t even be answered.
According to a recent report from the national taxpayer advocate, a steady string of Republican-led budget cuts means that of roughly 100 million calls to the IRS last year, only 24% were answered.
“Put differently, IRS employees did not answer more than 75 million telephone calls from taxpayers seeking help in complying with their tax obligations,” said taxpayer advocate Erin M. Collins.
This being the land of opportunity, an enterprising Florida company [Florida, of course it's Florida] has come up with a solution — for a price.
The company, called EnQ, swamps the IRS’ switchboard with its own calls, then sells desirable, time-saving slots near the head of the hold line to accountants and tax preparers willing to pay up to $1,000 a year.
By subscribing to the line-cutting service, EnQ says, tax professionals trying to reach the IRS can slash their waits on hold by as much as 90%.
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Basically, Valiente has come up with a business that’s a lot like somebody offering, for a fee, to wait in line on your behalf outside Best Buy ahead of Black Friday.
No, because that person waiting in line does not run around the crowd with a machete to scare other people away.
Their business model is literally to take access away from other people by flooding the switchboard.
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I learned about EnQ from a Baldwin Park certified public accountant named Arturo Pedroza.
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However, as a taxpayer, he said EnQ’s moneymaking scheme “doesn’t sit well with me.”
“It seems that they’re monetizing something that should be free and available to everyone,” Pedroza observed. “They’re making a problem worse, and the IRS hasn’t done anything about it.”
Raphael Tulino, an IRS spokesperson, declined to comment on EnQ or its business practices.
He did point me, though, to a transcript of IRS Commissioner Charles P. Rettig’s testimony to Congress in May about the agency’s operations.
Rettig said there’s been “record-breaking and unprecedented phone demand this year.”
On March 15 alone, he said, 8.6 million calls — about 1,500 per second — were made to the IRS, compared with normal filing-season volume of up to 3 million calls a day.
Needless to say, the vast majority of those calls went unanswered. Rettig told lawmakers that the IRS’ ability to handle calls “is significantly less than where we want to be.”
Because EnQ is flooding the lines. It's the tragedy of the commons, only more evil.
These people need to be jailed. Hell, they need to be horse-whipped.
J/T Cory Doctorow.
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