IRS phone service is falling behind: Internal watchdog

The agency's phone service is in shambles, with employees spending more than 1 million work hours a year just waiting for the phone to ring, according to the latest annual report from inside the agency. Despite this, they say they are answering far fewer calls than official indicators suggest. the National Tax Advocate (NTA), a watchdog agency;

The IRS boasted in October that its phone lines to Congress had a “service level” of 75%, but employees answered only 29% of calls from taxpayers throughout the fiscal year. was discovered in an investigation by the National Tax Agency.

That's down from the 35 percent of calls actually answered during the 2023 filing season, according to the Internal Revenue Service's interim report released in June. During this period, the IRS reported that its “service level” was 85 percent.

The IRS noted that “service level” is an internal metric that excludes the number of people directed to a robot or the number of people who simply hang up before contacting someone to resolve their problem.

“IRS phone assistants spent 1.27 million hours waiting for the phone to ring during the 2023 filing season, accounting for 34% of the time IRS employees are allotted to answering phones. “The number of unproductive years for employees is equivalent to more than 650 years,” the IRS reported.

Outdated technology prevents IRS employees from easily switching back and forth between answering calls and processing tax returns, leading to significant time wastage, the Internal Revenue Service said.

Despite operational inefficiencies, service levels have significantly improved over the past year after the pandemic government shutdown led to a large backlog of tax returns and even more unanswered calls. That's an improvement, said taxpayer advocate Erin Collins.

This progress was accelerated by the injection of cash into government agencies through the Democrats' Inflation Control Act (IRA), passed in 2022.

Aimed to update the IRS's aging technology, some of which is still running About programming languages Developed in the 1950s, the fund also increases the IRS's auditing capabilities. The IRS has created a new division specifically to pursue unpaid taxes held by corporations classified as partnerships, which account for the bulk of the $668 billion in uncollected taxes annually.

But that increased funding, and with it the IRS's service levels, is also under threat.

In just one year, Republicans recouped $20 billion of the original $80 billion funding boost they had planned to spend over the next 10 years.

“The concessions we achieved include an additional $10 billion ($20 billion total) in cuts to mandatory IRS funding that was a key part of the Democrats' Inflation Control Act,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson. (R-Rabada) said in a Sunday letter to colleagues that it had announced the largest budget deal yet.

Democrats maintain that the IRS review is still underway.

“Keep in mind, we already agreed to withdraw $20.2 billion as part of the FRA agreement,” Democratic aides wrote in a memo to reporters. “With today's agreement, that will happen this year instead of taking two years.”

“The IRS will be able to continue to maintain the important investments it secured in the last Congress,” the aide said.

The IRS report also accused the IRS of joking about identity theft cases.

“[There are] “There are unreasonable delays in providing assistance to victims of tax-related identity theft,” the report states.

“meanwhile [fiscal] “In 2023, the IRS took an average of approximately 19 months to resolve self-reported identity theft cases and send refunds to affected taxpayers,” Collins wrote. “Let me say it again for emphasis: the identity theft victim has to wait more than a year and a half until the IRS resolves the case and receives the money he is owed.”