Taxpayer Rights After a Decade Revisited

Abstract

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TBOR). Until 2014, there was no single pronouncement of US taxpayers' rights. At various points, Congress enacted pieces of legislation labeled "Taxpayer Bill of Rights". The original TBOR in 1988, TBOR II in 1996, and TBOR III in 1998, "created substantive changes in the tax laws, such as adding procedures for the IRS to follow, giving taxpayers greater access to the Tax Court, giving taxpayers the right to sue under certain circumstances, creating the Taxpayer Advocate Service, etc." Nina Olson, the National Taxpayer Advocate from 2001 until 2019, was a major proponent of a TBOR in the form of "a concise and explicit list of taxpayer rights and obligations"The IRS adopted the idea administratively in 2014 6. Congress then codified the same TBOR rights in Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 7803(a)(3).