While budget reductions are partly responsible for the well-publicized decrease in customer service at the IRS, inadequate management controls also contribute, GAO has said.
The GAO report is the latest in a long line from the agency’s IG, an outside taxpayer advocate and the agency itself documenting the decrease in service accompanying a roughly 10 percent budget reduction since 2010. The percentage of callers who sought assistance and received it slipped gradually from 74 to 64.4 percent over 2010-2014 before dropping sharply to 38.1 percent in 2015. Meanwhile, the average wait rose from 10.8 to 19.6 minutes over five years before jumping to 30.5 minutes in 2015. Those results occurred even though about 6 percent fewer calls for customer service came in during 2015 as compared with 2010, it added.
In addition to degraded phone service, the agency also has “struggled to answer correspondence in a timely manner and assistors increasingly either failed to send required correspondence to taxpayers or included inaccurate information in correspondence sent. IRS has taken steps to remind assistors to send correspondence, but does not have adequate controls to ensure that they send accurate correspondence before closing cases.” Also, the parent Treasury Department does not include correspondence performance goals in its performance plan, and therefore, does not have a complete set of measures to assess performance, it said.
Further, Treasury and IRS “have neither developed nor have any plans to develop a comprehensive customer service strategy to define appropriate service levels and benchmark to the best in business or customer expectations as GAO has previously recommended. Without such a strategy, Treasury and IRS can neither measure nor effectively communicate to Congress the types and levels of customer service taxpayers should expect, and the resources needed to reach those levels.”
It recommended: that Congress consider requiring Treasury to develop a comprehensive customer service strategy in consultation with IRS; that Treasury should update its performance plan to include goals for correspondence; and that the IRS should assess the feasibility of a control to require assistors to send out required correspondence and evaluate return processing operations to identify inefficiencies. It said Treasury neither agreed nor disagreed with GAO’s recommendation to update its performance plan but said it would coordinate with the IRS; the IRS agreed with GAO’s two other recommendations.
