The IRS dealt with a number of challenges in the fiscal 2010 filing season in processing individual income tax returns, issuing refunds, and responding to taxpayers, and saw improvement in some areas and fluctuation in others, GAO has said.
It said electronic filing, which reduces costs to IRS, increased about 3 percent, to 71 percent of all individual returns.
However, IRS experienced delays in issuing millions of refunds related to the new Making Work Pay credit and conducting additional automated checks.
Compared to 2009, the percentage of callers seeking live assistance who received it improved in 2010 and the accuracy of answers remained high, at over 90 percent, though average wait time increased, according to GAO-11-111.