The Internal Revenue Service, which processes about 130
million tax returns each year, has improved some filing
season services but long-term goals would help manage
strategic tradeoffs, the Government Accountability Office
has said.
It said that in fiscal 2005, return and refund processing
went smoothly, that the accuracy of responses to telephone
inquiries about tax law and about taxpayer accounts
improved significantly, and that the IRS website performed
well.
However, in the face of budget cuts the agency has shifted
resources from taxpayer services to enforcement, which makes
providing quality service to taxpayers a challenge, according
to GAO-06-51.
It said that once IRS reduced access to telephone assistance,
longer wait times led callers to hang up. Still, IRS officials
viewed the trade off as preferable to cutting back on
processing, and it’s possible some callers decided to look
for assistance online rather than wait on the phone.
Consistent with IRS’s strategy of cutting employees in taxpayer
assistance centers, the number of taxpayers visiting walk-in
sites continued to decline while the number of returns prepared
at volunteer sites increased, the report said.
However, it said the agency continues to lack reliable data on
the accuracy of walk-in and volunteer site assistance.
Further, while over half of all returns were filed online this
year, the agency is not on track to achieve its long-term goal
of having 80 percent of all returns filed online by 2007, the
report said.
It said IRS has been developing long-term goals to help assess
progress and understand the impact of budget decisions, but
because of the difficulty of developing goals, the agency has
experienced delays and lacks a schedule for finalizing them.
