Overall the IRS processed 2013 returns in a timely way despite the furloughs and partial government shutdown of that summer and fall—aided in part by the growth of electronic filing—GAO has said, but service to customers calling on the phone “remained low and wait times remained high compared to prior years.”
While boosting automated phone information services helped, more than a third of calls ended with the taxpayer hanging up, receiving a busy signal, or being disconnected before reaching an assistor. Some of those taxpayers then turn to other IRS operations such as taxpayer assistance centers and correspondence staff, simply moving the workload from one place to another, GAO said.
The agency has not benchmarked its telephone service against the best in the business “because of budget constraints and difficulty in identifying comparable organizations, according to IRS officials. By not comparing itself to other call center operations, IRS is missing an opportunity to identify and address gaps between actual and desired service, and inform Congress about resources needed to close the gap,” GAO said.
In addition, the agency’s managers would benefit if the agency set numerical goals such as a reduction in wait time, since they would be better able to assess how well their staffs are performing and see what would be needed to gain improvement, it said.
The IRS said it has done targeted comparisons but that it is not comparable to other organizations and disagreed with a recommendation that it set goals according to those standards; however, GAO said that benchmarking all aspects of service to the best in business “could help IRS improve its service.”
The report is here: http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/667563.pdf
