IRS customer service levels hit their peak a decade ago and have been eroding since, in particular during the last several years of budgetary restrictions, the IRS Taxpayer Advocate told a House appropriations hearing.
What Nina Olson called the high-water mark was 2004, when the IRS answered 87 percent of the calls it received from taxpayers seeking to speak with an assistor and hold times averaged 2.5 minutes.By contrast, in the first six weeks of this year, the IRS answered only 43 percent of the calls it received from taxpayers seeking to speak with a customer service representative, and those who managed to get through waited on hold for an average of about 28 minutes. That’s down from the 77 percent with an average of about 10 minutes during the same period last year.
She told the panel that IRS management’s actions have eroded public trust in the agency—a commonly cited justification for the budget restrictions that have resulted among other things in about a 10 percent reduction from a workforce of about 100,000.
But she said that “trust will not be rebuilt until the IRS begins to provide the taxpayer service that taxpayers expect, need, and deserve to comply with the tax laws. Ultimately, I do not believe that can happen until the IRS receives additional funding to hire more customer service employees to answer taxpayers’ telephone calls, process taxpayers’ correspondence in a timely manner, and assist taxpayers who seek assistance at its walk-in sites.”
“Specifically, the IRS must be able to demonstrate that it is making responsible decisions in allocating its existing resources; that it is basing these decisions on research data that is comprehensive, not just on what is convenient for the IRS; and that it has a strategic and creative vision for the future – one that considers the needs of taxpayers even as it tries to go about doing its work efficiently,” she said.
