Very few issues would touch a red button like talking to a tax practitioner or a taxpayer trying to reach the IRS by phone. In recent years it has felt like Mission Impossible.
Last week the IRS began to take action to fight back against one of the problems facing the phone issue - robocalls by companies allowing their clients to reach the IRS via a pay for service contract.
Summary: A company named EnQ (callenq.com) set up a "cutting in line" service that purported to do tax practitioners a favor by connecting you, for a large monthly fee, to IRS's Practitioner Priority Hotline without the long wait time. What the "service" actually did was to hog the hotline, so that you pretty much had to pay them their $300/month or you couldn't get through at all. So now the IRS is using AI technology to weed out the calls from EnQ.
I expect this racket to spread to many other government hotlines. Maybe it already has and I just don't know about them.
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