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1 1 (September 8, 2022)

handle is hein.crs/goveisy0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Congressional ____ ~ Research Service Phone Service at the Internal Revenue Service During the 2022 Filing Season September 8, 2022 Some policymakers have grown frustrated with shortcomings in the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS's) customer service during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the independent National Taxpayer Advocate, IRS Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) answered 18% of taxpayers' calls routed to them during the 2022 filing season. This level of service (LOS) is effectively unchanged from the 19% of calls the IRS answered during the 2021 season. However, both are significantly below the 59% answered in 2019. Additionally, this season (2022), the average caller who did get through to an IRS agent waited 29 minutes, an increase of 9 minutes from last year and 19 minutes from 2019. The Taxpayer Advocate has suggested the IRS should aim to achieve an 85% LOS, while the IRS itself aimed to achieve a 32% LOS in 2021 and a 30% LOS in 2020. These lower figures were meant to accommodate the agency's competing needs during the pandemic. LOS figures do not account for calls that encounter busy signals, disconnect before entering the queue for an agent, or receive an automated response. Impact on Taxpayers Waiting on hold costs taxpayers time. Failing to get their questions answered could leave taxpayers frustrated and confused, and in turn jeopardize tax compliance. If a taxpayer who was unable to get their question answered makes an error, the IRS could theoretically remedy it by requesting correspondence or requiring the taxpayer to amend their return. However, many such amended returns must be submitted on paper and processed manually, which takes significantly longer than processing electronic returns. As a result, the IRS had a backlog of 5.3 million pieces of correspondence and amended returns at the end of May 2022. It took the agency an average of over eight months to process taxpayer responses to proposed adjustments in FY2022 through May 21, 2022, more than three times as long as in FY2019. Calls Surged Amid the Pandemic During 2021, the IRS answered 16 million calls-a 56% increase from 2019 (about 10 million), as illustrated in Figure 1. These 16 million calls represented less than 10% of all calls received in 2021, because call volumes soared by over 300% between 2019 and 2021. This season (2022), the IRS received Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov IN12004 CRS INSIGHT Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress

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