An IG report has said that both the budget situation and decisions by agency management contributed to the drop in IRS phone service to taxpayers in recent years, with the latter based on projections that didn’t fully pan out.
The agency supplements its regular appropriation for taxpayer services with funds from certain user fees, the report said, but in fiscal 2015 only $40 million was put to that use, far below that of previous years, due to needs elsewhere.
Meanwhile, it said, the IRS devoted more of its available resources to work on correspondence from taxpayers rather than telephone assistance.
“The IRS emphasized the working of correspondence at the start of the 2015 filing season rather than answering telephone calls to reduce the long-term impact on correspondence inventory. Accounts management function officials stated that they planned for a higher volume of correspondence receipts in FY 2015, but actual receipts did not match their projections,” the report said.
“An additional reason for moving employees from answering telephones to working paper correspondence and setting a sharply lower level of service goal for telephone assistance was to prevent the significant aging of taxpayer correspondence. However, our analysis of correspondence inventory at the beginning of FY 2015 does not support the IRS’s reason for using a higher percentage of FTEs to work correspondence.”
