Getting Rid of Non-English Tax Help Is a Lose-Lose Policy

When the thrash-metal band Stormtroopers of Death recorded “Speak English or Die,” its members went out of their way to remind listeners that they “didn’t really mean” what they were singing. By contrast, the Trump administration is apparently quite serious about making the US officially an English-speaking nation. The latest salvo in this battle is the possible elimination of non-English taxpayer services at the Internal Revenue Service. An August 15 letter from 25 Democratic Senators points out that such a move would fly in the face of the IRS’s mission and would make our already-growing federal budget deficits even worse.

Before US President Donald Trump issued an executive order declaring English the official language of the US earlier this year, the country had never had one. Even England, which invented the language and used it for some time before Americans borrowed it, never felt the need to declare it the official language of the land. But Trump’s new order changed all that, directly revoking a Clinton-era EO entitled “Improving Access to Services for Persons with Limited English Proficiency.”

If “improving access” sounds like a thing our government should be fostering when it comes to paying taxes, that’s because it is—and until this year, both elected officials and tax administrators have been fully in support of this sensible goal.

Since its inception in 1996, the Taxpayer Advocate Service (which was created by Congress to represent the interests of American taxpayers in their dealings with tax administrators) has identified the inability to “serve non-English speakers at first contact” as a critical problem of tax administration that could only be remedied by making taxpayer assistance available in multiple languages.

While Trump’s executive order wants us to “freely exchange ideas in one shared language,” forcing non-English speakers to use Google Translate in claiming their Qualified Business Income deduction won’t achieve this goal.

After Congress created a National Commission on Restructuring the Internal Revenue Service in 1995, the commission’s recommendations were heavily focused on transforming the IRS into an agency focused on customer service, and (as last week’s letter from Democratic Senators to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent points out) prompted the IRS to retool its mission statement to a single-sentence focus on “helping [American taxpayers to] understand and meet their tax responsibilities.”

Seen through this lens, making tax filing easier for non-English speakers is a blazingly obvious goal to pursue, and to their credit IRS leaders have consistently supported this goal. As recently as 2022, it stated that “wherever possible, it’s important to interact with people in the language of their choice and in their community through IRS employees who share similar life experiences.”

But even if the IRS’ own mission statement didn’t demand it, non-English tax assistance would still be important simply because it makes good fiscal sense: If you make it easier for people to file their tax returns, they probably will do so and do it accurately. And if you make it harder for them to do so, they’re more likely to do it wrong, or not file returns at all. This is why it’s well established that money spent on taxpayer service and administration more than pays for itself in increased tax collections.

There’s no question that the IRS’ non-English tax assistance is being used: Former Commissioner Charles Rettig says that there were “nearly 90 million visits to non-English pages on IRS.gov” in 2021, a number that has surely grown since then. This is a clear success story for tax administration: People needed non-English language help to file their tax returns, and they got it.

The Trump administration now seems bent on stripping these gains away in the pursuit of a goal they surely won’t achieve. While Trump’s executive order wants us to “freely exchange ideas in one shared language,” forcing non-English speakers to use Google Translate in claiming their Qualified Business Income deduction won’t achieve this goal. Making it harder for non-English speakers to file their taxes would only result in lower tax compliance, less government revenue, and less trust in the Internal Revenue Service.