Despite the move to electronic filing and record-keeping, the IRS still deals with a great deal of paperwork, spending $33 million a year just for storage costs, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has said.
The agency has 5.42 million cubic feet of paper tax records stored at various Federal Records Centers throughout the country and “inefficient management of costs related to records storage reduces the resources the IRS has available to deliver its mission,” the report said.
For example, nearly 300,000 cubic feet of the total is slated for destruction but delays in doing so required it to continue to pay $700,000 to store it in 2013, the report said. It added, though, that by March of this year the IRS had destroyed all but 16,000 feet of that.
TIGTA also found that the review process and documentation supporting records storage service invoices were not sufficient to reasonably validate the charges billed for the services, also leaving room for unnecessary costs. The IRS acknowledged that the approach used to certify the invoices needed improvement and advised TIGTA that it is in the process of addressing this issue by developing additional guidance specifically focused on reviewing and validating invoice charges.
The report is here: http://www.treas.gov/tigta/auditreports/2014reports/201410074fr.html.
