Taking on the IRS

I recently concluded a protracted battle against (With? For? You decide as we go.) the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the United States of America, and I'm happy to report that my (our) cause prevailed in the end, though not after considerable effort.

Obviously the IRS isn't a particularly well-loved institution simply by the nature of its business, but I'm not going to get into any discussions about their mission or policy or anything like that. If anything, I think they're underappreciated for performing an important function (collecting revenue) that also happens to be uniquely thankless. I've been able to work with them effectively for years now. I'm not coming at this from the same angle as, to take two examples, that insane psycho douchebag who flew a plane into an IRS building a few years back, or, say, Grover Norquist. In fact, my role in this saga isn't as a taxpayer and it's nothing to do with my personal finances. Rather, it's in my role as a Site Coordinator at an IRS-backed Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) site. As you'll see, I was just trying to make things easier for everyone.

As a background note, I should mention that operating a VITA site requires one to generate quite a bit of paperwork for various agencies, including the IRS. I'm not complaining about this - I understand why this documentation is in place and always work to complete mine promptly. Prior to the filing season, I was required to fill out a few forms for my site, as every year. No problem. Not surprisingly, they were .pdf fill-in forms; you just download the copies, fill in your site's information, sign electronically, ship them back to your IRS liaison.

This is all well and good, except that I discovered that this year I wasn't able to save the two fill-in forms that I was supposed to complete. The form actually says, "The security settings on this document prevent adding text and/or placing a signature on it from Adobe Reader." Well, that's no good! It reduces significantly the utility of a fill-in form if one is not able to actually fill in the form, save changes, and return said form. Frankly, I'm not sure why Adobe Acrobat even allows such a thing. Anyway, I quickly discovered that while I couldn't save the filled-in forms with the free Adobe Reader, I was indeed able to fill in and save the forms using Adobe Acrobat Professional. Clearly this is a mistake - there's no way the IRS was trying to discriminate among volunteers running different levels of Adobe software. If anything, you'd think the IRS would want to make it as easy as possible for their partners to return these documents. I figured it was just a minor oversight by whoever set the permissions when creating the documents. It's worth pointing out here that the previous year's version allowed one to fill in forms using Reader; I know this because the old versions were (and still are) posted to the IRS' public site. I had received the updated versions from someone with access to the IRS' internal site.

I contacted my liaison at the IRS about this issue. Not because it affected me - I had access to Acrobat Pro and was able to return my completed forms quickly - but because I wanted anyone else who was required to complete these documents, but who didn't have access to Acrobat Pro, to be able to do so easily. We're all on the same team here, right? I was informed curtly that, "You are the only one who have email me with. Others have the same adobe as you or they fax it back." [all sic]

They fax it. Great, I'll get in my time machine and head back to the past, when people still faxed things.

My first reaction was, in the words of Jean-Luc Picard, "Not good enough!!!" I was quite disappointed in this response - not only did it make no attempt whatsoever to address my concern, it was clearly designed to make it look like I was the problem here. To the IRS official's credit, we were able to clear up that part of the situation, and I don't think this individual had any negative intentions. Nevertheless from this point on, correcting these forms was a personal mission of mine, no matter how trivial the victory or small the stakes.

My next move was to actually call the IRS' help line and see if they could get word to their technical people about this issue with the pdf fill-in permissions of these forms. If you've ever worked with Acrobat Professional or otherwise generated pdf files, you probably know that making this correction would literally take someone in the IRS' IT office two minutes to fix. The issue is getting that info to the right person, as I found out.

The IRS guy on the phone seemed competent, but I got the sense the entire time that he wasn't really listening to me. I tried to explain the issue as clearly as I could, but I wasn't getting through. He downloaded the files from the public site (which are the old versions, as I have explained to you and also explained to him), filled in changes and saved them with Acrobat Reader, and pretty much dismissed my concerns. I thought can't you just get me on the horn with your computer guy for like five minutes? but thanked him and considered my next move.

As you may have guessed, I did not give up at this point. I still think it's important for Site Coordinators to be able to fill these out without having to jump through hoops, and frankly I think this is something the IRS should get right. No, it's not a huge deal, but I felt like I needed to prove a point. Thus began my dance with the IRS' e-mail help desk.

After considerable searching to locate their e-mail address, I crafted a long, detailed email to the IRS' help desk about the issue regarding which I have thus far crafted a long, detailed blog post. What I received back, a day later, was a halfhearted, patronizing response referring me to a couple of IRS pages that describe how to use fill-in forms. This was utterly infuriating - anyone who actually read my note would have been able to tell easily that I was well past their instructions for beginners on using Adobe Reader. I fired back a response that read (as politely as I could whittle it down to), "This response does not resolve my issue - in fact, it does not even really attempt to resolve it."

My first message to them was sent on October 16, 2012 and the initial "response" showed up in my inbox a day later. I sent follow-up emails on Nov 1, Nov 18, and Dec 6 (the last one included a heads-up on some broken links on their website). Each time, they would follow up with an automated reply that they had received my request, and about two weeks later, send me a link to an online survey asking me to describe my email experience. Each time, I followed the link, and calmly and honestly brutalized their surveys, since most of the time I had received no response whatsoever by the time the survey link rolled in. I wasn't impolite or anything - I just consistently awarded the lowest grades possible and pointed out in no uncertain terms that I had received no responses or, at best, a thoroughly inadequate response.

Then, on Jan. 3, I received a short, pleasant response: they had corrected the file permissions and posted the updated versions on the IRS internal site.

I WIN.

That's not a good way to phrase it - everyone wins when things are done correctly and designed for efficiency. Still, I couldn't help but feel pleased that my efforts had produced the desired result.

Or had they? You see, I can't access the IRS' internal site to verify, so I went back to my liaison to see if I could acquire a copy of the revised documents. Twenty-six days and one reminder e-mail later, I got them - and they worked. I immediately sent an e-mail thanking the liaison, then one thanking the Help Desk, and filled out a survey where, at last, I was able to give them high marks for their work. Win-win-win.

So you see, the next time someone tells you that you can't achieve something of relatively limited value simply on general principle, just by being persistent, you can tell them this dazzling tale.