IG: The IRS can be more transparent about reporting what taxpayers can expect when calling for assistance. Image: chainarong06/Shutterstock.com
The main customer service level indicators that the IRS widely reports “do not fully reflect the taxpayer experience,” which is more negative than those figures indicate, an IG report has said.
Those indicators include a “level of service” measure of the ability for a taxpayer to reach a human on the phone when requested and average waiting times—which for the 2024 tax filing season were reported as 88 of a scale of 100 and three minutes, respectively.
“Because of high demand for service during the filing season, the IRS temporarily reassigns employees from other job responsibilities to answer calls. This helps improve the average reported wait time and LOS during the filing season. However, similar telephone service measures for the entire fiscal year are not widely reported and varied considerably,” it said.
Further, those figures reflect only calls made to 33 accounts management lines during the filing season, and do not account for calls outside that season nor to 27 other lines that account for the other third.
“According to IRS data, the average wait times for the other telephone lines were much longer than 3 minutes, averaging 17 to 19 minutes during the 2024 Filing Season,” it said. The filing season level of service score was 43 for the compliance unit and 27 for other business units.
It said that the monthly scores for the accounts management unit over the entirety of 2024 ranged to as low as 48, while the enterprise-wide figure was as low as 45, both in June.
IRS management disagreed with a recommendation to widely report both the accounts management level of service and the enterprise-wide level of service throughout the entire year. It said that since tax season is when the agency receives the highest level of call volume, those data help inform taxpayers to decide when is the best time to contact it. Reporting all the data recommended by the IG “would be confusing to the public and maintaining timely data would present an undue administrative burden,” it said.
The IG responded in turn that “Continuing to widely report only the AM LOS during the filing season is misleading to taxpayers. We maintain that the IRS can be more transparent about reporting what taxpayers can expect when calling for assistance by reporting LOS metrics throughout the year.”
The auditors added that while the widely reported figures for the 2025 tax filing season are on track to about equal those of the 2024 season, those figures do not reflect staff losses now underway that will result in reducing the IRS workforce by about a quarter. “The staffing impacts on the remainder of calendar year 2025 and the 2026 Filing Season are unknown, but we will be monitoring these issues,” it said.
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