Fiscal Year 2024 Statutory Review of Compliance With Legal Guidelines When Issuing Levies

The Director, Collection Policy, SB/SE Division, should revise the Internal Revenue Manual (IRM) to require revenue officers to check their mail and faxes for any CDP levy hearing requests prior to issuing levies.

The Director, Field Collection, SB/SE Division, should ensure that the following instances identified in this report are discussed with responsible employees and their managers so that they understand the difference and can protect taxpayer’s rights: instances associated with CDP hearings being input as equivalent hearings; instances associated with cases being transferred to a new revenue officer before the prior revenue officer had processed a timely CDP levy hearing request; instances associated with new employees and CDP hearings; instances associated with revenue officers improperly processing ICS systemic levies as other, incorrect types of levies; and instances associated with taxpayers not receiving or not timely receiving their CDP rights due to various revenue officer errors.

The Director, Collection Inventory and Delivery and Selection, SB/SE Division, should implement a programming fix to ensure that the ICS does not allow levies to be issued on Business Master File taxpayers who have an open CDP levy hearing.

The Director, Collection Policy, SB/SE Division, should provide training to remind revenue officers that for manually created balance due modules within the ICS, they must manually verify the CDP levy notice was timely issued and that the modules are not part of an open CDP hearing prior to levy. In addition, revise the IRM to require that revenue officers document the ICS history with confirmation that required notices were provided prior to issuing a levy on a manually created balance due module.

The Director, Collection Inventory and Delivery and Selection, SB/SE Division, should submit programming maintenance fix requests to ensure that: (1) the ICS does not allow modules to be included on a levy unless a CDP levy notice has been issued, even if both the notice generation tool and the levy generation tool are open at the same time and (2) the ICS systemic levy check does not allow levies to be sent until 31 days after the CDP levy notice date rather than 30 days.