That’s what the Commish recently said, echoed by the National Taxpayer Advocate. Koskinen predicts that nearly half the folks trying to reach IRS by phone, before next April 15 celebrations, probably won’t get through.

“Phone service (he uses the term loosely – ed.) could plummet to 53 percent,” quoth the Commish. That would be down from an already unacceptable 72 percent during the 2014 filing season!

Blaming Congress’ miserly attitude when it comes to the IRS’ budget request, Koskinen said, “All we can do is try to maximize our services as well as we can, as well as we can is still going to be miserable. You really do get what you pay for.”

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And here comes Advocate Nina Olson who notes, “The filing season is going to be the worst filing season since I’ve been the National Taxpayer Advocate (in 2001); I’d love to be proved wrong, but I think it will rival the 1985 filing season when returns disappeared.”

Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

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And aside from the IRS’ woeful budget allocations, consider that this will be the first filing season in which folks will be forced to deal with two major provisions of the “Affordable” Care Act: the premium tax credit and the “individual shared responsibility payment,” not to mention implications of the “Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act,” or FATCA.

Amid all of this bad news, how about a few more nuggets from Senator Coburn’s recently published Wastebook 2014, revealing lo the many ways the government finds to waste all of those tax dollars they extract from we and thee.

The Pentagon is spending a billion dollars to destroy $16 billion in excess purchases of military grade ammunition. The amount of surplus ammo is now so large that the cost of destroying it will equal the full year’s salary for over 54,000 Army privates! Over time, you see, the amount of ammo deemed no longer necessary has grown to nearly 40 percent of the Army’s total inventory!

The University of California at Los Angeles is offering an undergraduate course exploring “the nature of human laughter and humor” with the support of $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. (Makes one wonder whether to laugh or cry.)

NASA (no longer worrying about moon landings and space shuttles) sponsored a $15,000 challenge to locate the lost tomb of Genghis Khan, the Mongol leader “responsible for the deaths of as many as 40 million people,” and conquering more territory “than any individual in history.”

As the saying goes — you can’t make this stuff up.

CONSULT YOUR TAX ADVISOR – This article contains general information about various tax matters. You should consult your CPA regarding the implications to your own particular situation. Jeff Quinn, the author of this article, is a shareholder in Ashley Quinn, CPAs and Consultants, Ltd., with offices in Incline Village and Reno. He welcomes comments at jquinn@ashleyquinncpas.com.