The IRS has been touting the thousands of new agents it hired with funding from the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. But while there are serious questions about what all of these new employees are doing, it's obvious the agency could use a few more to work the phone lines. A new report from the IRS Taxpayer Advocate Service finds that only 31% of callers to the IRS actually get through to a human. And that doesn't even include callers who hung up or got sent to a recorded message.
The report is disconcerting, considering it comes as the agency has bragged about hiring some 7,000 new customer service agents and focusing on improving wait times. "We have the average wait times down to three minutes, we've seen more people in our walk-in centers than we've ever seen in our history, and we've seen record traffic to IRS.gov, because we've updated it with new tools that taxpayers are using," said IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel in a recent interview with Fox News.
The Taxpayer Advocate's report begs to differ with Werfel's assessment, however. The report finds an average hold time of 10 minutes for those who do eventually get through to an agent. And the agency's backlog extends beyond the phone lines. The report shows there are still some 500,000 unresolved cases on the IRS docket, with some individual cases taking up to 22 months to resolve.
Werfel acknowledges the agency is still in a transition phase, but insists things are and will continue to get better. "We want to make sure our systems can handle the load, and we're in a process of modernizing all the technology at the IRS," he told Fox. "So...we want to make sure that we have all kinds of redundancies built into the system."
For now, the only redundancy for most callers is "please wait on the line."
Photo: Anadolu Agency