IRS should be more transparent when communicating phone service metrics, report says

The IRS should be more transparent in communicating its telephone service metrics by including in the metrics more phone lines that taxpayers call and by covering the entire fiscal year and not just filing season, an agency watchdog said in a report.

The IRS reported a level of service (LOS) of 88% and wait times averaging three minutes for the 2024 filing season. The LOS calculates the percentage of calls to the IRS’s accounts management (AM) phone lines that are answered by a live assistor.

But those metrics only included calls made to the 33 staffed AM telephone lines, which handled about two-thirds of all calls answered by IRS, according to the report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).

The IRS separately tracks an enterprise LOS, which includes the 27 staffed non-AM telephone lines for other IRS business units in addition to the 33 staffed AM telephone lines. Those 27 non-AM telephone lines handled about one-third of all calls answered by IRS telephone assistors.

For the 2024 filing season, the enterprise LOS was 63% with an average wait time of eight minutes, TIGTA said.

The LOS also does not include calls sent to automation and calls that are dropped before they reach a queue.

The LOS figures that cover only the AM lines and only during filing season — the ones that the IRS widely reports — “may be misleading to taxpayers,” TIGTA said. “If a taxpayer sets their expectations for interacting with the IRS on the telephone based on the reported average wait times and LOS, when their experience is different, they may grow frustrated and hang up, leaving their issue unresolved,” TIGTA’s report said.

Another issue is that the average speed of answer — the average time that it takes an IRS telephone assistor to answer a call in the queue — does not represent the total time that a taxpayer or tax practitioner spends on a telephone call, TIGTA said.

When a call is transferred and returned to the queue, the IRS counts each transfer as a separate service in computing the average wait time, TIGTA said, meaning the IRS does not report the total time a caller spends waiting in queues.

TIGTA considers the AM metrics as being “widely reported” because the IRS commissioner included them in testimony to Congress, and they have been reported on the IRS’s and Treasury’s websites.

TIGTA recommended that the IRS widely report to the public both the enterprise and AM LOS throughout the entire fiscal year and that it report the average wait times for all lines throughout the year.

TIGTA’s report is not the first criticism of the IRS’s emphasis on LOS and how it’s measured. National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins has questioned LOS in the past, including in a 2024 report to Congress.

“In my opinion, the AM LOS measure has taken on outsized importance in recent years, as the IRS has allocated resources to hit ambitious but arbitrary goals that mean less than meets the eye and that consequently have required the IRS to neglect calls to non-AM telephone lines and workstreams like paper correspondence that I believe should receive higher priority,” Collins wrote. “The measure is causing the IRS to prioritize the wrong work, and it needs to be replaced.”

The IRS disagreed with both TIGTA recommendations. Ken Corbin, IRS chief, Taxpayer Services, said the enterprise LOS and average speed of service are published in the IRS Data Book.

For the first recommendation, the IRS responded that the LOS metric “does not provide information to determine taxpayer experience when calling.”

On the second recommendation, the IRS wrote that it “provide[s] the estimated wait times based on the filing season, allowing taxpayers to decide the best time to contact the IRS based on the taxpayer’s schedule. The majority of telephone demand is received on the IRS’s main helpline.”

Including wait times for additional lines “would be confusing to the public, and maintaining timely data would present an undue administrative burden.”

Meanwhile, the IRS is developing a new measure to track the percentage of calls in which the telephone assistor resolves a taxpayer’s issue during the first contact, TIGTA said. During fiscal year 2025, the IRS plans to get leadership approval and begin collecting data to establish a baseline for the new measure, TIGTA said.

— To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Martha Waggoner at Martha.Waggoner@aicpa-cima.com.