As of late last year, 35 of 361 taxpayer assistance centers were closed due to “lack of available staffing”. Image: Your Hand Please/Shutterstock.com
While the IRS met some of its goals for the 2023 filing season reflecting the additional funding the agency received last year, it fell short in others, including staffing its taxpayer assistance centers, an inspector general report has said.
It said that as of late last year, 35 of the then 361 taxpayer assistance centers were closed due to “lack of available staffing” and issues such as employee long-term absences, and another 270 were understaffed. While the agency looked to add 700 employees to fully staff the centers for the 2023 filing season, it was able to hire only 576.
That resulted in a net gain of only 232 after accounting for turnover; 43 of the 363 centers as of this year were closed at some point during the filing season, about half of them for the entire January-April period.
“The challenge the IRS faces with its ability to hire for its TACs is like the hiring challenge it faces with other positions. Specifically, IRS employees continue to leave the agency. While the IRS wants to expand and fill new positions, it first needs to fill the positions associated with individuals leaving the agency,” it said.
The centers did increase the number of taxpayers they assisted during the filing season to about 937,000, up from 900,000 in 2022, but that was well short of the goal of 2.7 million, it added. The IRS also fell short of goals for reducing its backlog and scanning paper-filed returns, although it did reduce waiting times on calls and provide taxpayers the ability to submit certain additional documents online, it said.
The report was part of a series of evaluations of the agency’s use of additional funding under the Inflation Reduction Act and made no recommendations.
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