Something tells me — well, actually, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) tells me — that we taxpayers are not getting the service we expect and deserve from the IRS.

It’s been a tough week for the agency. On Tuesday, TIGTA released a review of the IRS toll-free telephone assistance program, which found significant increases in wait time and the number of disconnected calls during the 2009 filing season. A big part of the problem, quite apart from the complexities of stimulus payments and recovery rebate credits and what not, was the fact that the IRS required taxpayers to provide their AGI from their 2008 return for authentication purposes when filing electronically. You’ll never guess what happened. … Yes! Surprise! The help lines were swamped with nearly 5 million calls from irresponsible folks who couldn’t actually remember their AGI or lay their hands on a copy of their 2008 return.

Wednesday brought more bad news, this time a TIGTA audit that found serious faults in the IRS’s whistle-blower program, which is supposed to reward employees who provide information about tax problems in their workplace. In theory, whistle-blowers can score 15 percent to 30 percent of any additional tax the IRS manages to recover.

But the reality may be quite different. TIGTA found that the IRS “did not have an effective inventory control system with proper reporting and accurate information capture capabilities” for dealing with new claims. “The IRS has seen a significant growth in whistle-blower claims,” noted J. Russell George, the Treasury Inspector General for Administration, in a statement. “However, the Whistle-blower Office continues to have problems with managing and tracking cases, resulting in inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the tracking of large dollar claims.”

In addition, according to TIGTA, the law that originally established the Whistle-blower Office failed to provide adequate protection to employees against retaliation by their employers, “which can be a significant issue in some whistle-blower claims.”

Indeed, life can become suddenly risky for those who pick up the whistle — but there may be more to fear from the government than from any employer. The guy who blew the lid off the UBS tax shelter case, potentially recovering billions of tax dollars for the U.S. Treasury, is headed to a federal penitentiary for a 40-month stay starting in January, Time reported this week. Former UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld was arrested in June for helping a client hide assets from the U.S. government, even though he’d previously delivered the goods on UBS to the IRS, the DOJ, and the SEC, and had been assured by DOJ officials that they weren’t looking to prosecute him, according to Time.

High-profile cases like this aside, though, it’s clear that the nuts-and-bolts whistle-blower processes need some serious revamping. The IRS agrees, and says it will adopt TIGTA’s recommendations. ###