IRS taxpayer assistance centers still have some work to do on the customer service front

The IRS has made progress in customer service, especially for people calling its Taxpayer Assistance Centers (TACs). But the TACs still have issues, such as difficulty in dealing with calls to change appointments. In fact, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) has a few recommendations for the IRS in this regard. For details, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked with the Director of TIGTA’s management and exempt organization audits, Carl Aley.

Interview Transcript: 

Carl Aley
These are called Taxpayer Assistance Centers. And this is where you go in and get face to face service with the IRS. Before taxpayers get to the actual appointment. First step is to call in and call for an appointment. And there’s a special line, it’s a TAC appointment line. And they have made improvements compared to 2022, with respect to hanging up, not getting service to the some of these callers. And they’ve also reduced the wait time to actually talk to a customer service rep. And they reduced the the amount of time that it took to get an appointment. Now once they got into the tax, they also increased the number of appointments they actually conducted compared to 2022. And they also increased the number of employees that are working in the tax. So they’ve made some improvements there.

Tom Temin
And just to be clear, these the phoning in is for purposes of setting up what will be an in person appointment.

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Carl Aley
That’s correct. Now, the reason that the IRS does that is, in a lot of cases the IRS is able to resolve the taxpayers issue over the phone without the need for them to actually go in and visit a TAC. So that’s why they do it that way. In fact, in 2023, about 30, a little over 30% of all callers to the TAC, they were able to resolve their issue without the need to schedule an appointment.

Tom Temin
Right. So that really eases the burden on the TACs, if you can prevent people from coming in and resolve their issue.

Carl Aley
That’s correct. Both the taxpayer and the IRS has a reduced burden if the issue can be resolved over the telephone.

Tom Temin
But you also found that in changing or altering or canceling confirming appointments, there were some issues.

Carl Aley
There were. So when taxpayers were calling the appointment lines, we found that the IRS can make some improvements to reduce the number of times the calls are actually transferred. And we made some recommendations along those lines. Now once in the TACs, you’re right, they had the special Saturday hours. I think there were four of them that were from February through May of 2023. They did them once a month, some offer to more than than one weekend. We posed as taxpayers and visited 16 of those locations to assess the quality of operations. We asked one of two general tax law questions and assess the accuracy of the responses given. We also looked at things like orderliness, wait times, employee professionalism at these locations. And overall the service that was provided was accurate and professional. And the assistance that we received aligned with the tax all questions that we asked. And we did experience some very long wait times at some of the locations, three to seven hours. Sometimes that was in poor weather conditions outside. And our analysis also showed that the demand for the Saturday service exceeded that of the weekday service at those same locations for those same weeks.

Tom Temin
Just as an aside, it seems like the IRS should have them open evenings and weekends, even more than during the week, in some sense.

Carl Aley
So this year, what they did is they expanded the hours dorm filing season for Tuesdays and Thursdays. They were open early in the morning and later in the afternoon at select locations. So they are moving in the right direction to try to offer more hours. And they did do the Saturday hours again at select locations during this same February to May.

Tom Temin
Because of the average person calling to the centers to get an appointment either to get the resolution on the phone or to come in and have their taxpayer problem solved. These are not corporate individuals that have legal staffs and compliance staffs and accounting staffs that can maybe work nine to five on tax issues. Most of these are individual taxpayers. Fair to say?

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Carl Aley
That’s fair to say. A lot of the services again, can be handled over the phone, the ones that can’t, a lot of them involve identity theft verification, things like that cash payments. They didn’t do that on the Saturdays. But the services that are provided an attack are unique in that regard. And a lot of them were just individual taxpayers that are trying to get identity theft issues resolved.

Tom Temin
We’re speaking with Carl Aley. He’s director of customer service and exempt organization audits at the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. And just briefly, you mentioned transferring calls. Why does that have to happen and that seem to be trouble?

Carl Aley
So they have a software system that allows them to schedule appointments when you call in on the line. And any of the customer service representatives who are working those tech appointment lines can schedule the appointment. But it requires special licenses for the software in order to modify, either can change it or cancel those appointments. And what happens is, if a caller calls into the TAC appointment line and needs to make a change to an existing appointment, sometimes the person that they’re talking to doesn’t have that license. So they have to transfer them to another employee who does have that license on a different TAC line.

Tom Temin
Right. So how can they fix that? Do they have more licenses than assigning or can they be assigned dynamically?

Carl Aley
So that’s a good question. So they have, I believe it’s 2500 licenses throughout the service. Most of them are assigned to the employees who work in the TACs because they handle all aspects of the appointment. About 500 of them, I believe it is 500 of them are assigned to the customer service reps who work the phone lines. But the IRS had only allocated 200, about 200 of those 500. So there was 300 that were not assigned to any employee. So we recommend that they assign those to try to increase the number of employees who could assist taxpayers with those sorts of things. And also, the IRS is going to put in a telephone menu before so when a caller calls in, it’ll ask, are you trying to cancel or reschedule an appointment? And they’ll direct you directly to one of the agents who can help you with that instead of going to somebody who can.

Tom Temin
And these licenses are a grand total of $56 a year, it seems like they could really go to town and have 5,000 licenses, and they’d never have that problem.

Carl Aley
They are not inexpensive. So the way that it works, and you’re right, there are thousands of customer service representatives, any of whom could be assigned that can be trained to work the customer for the taxpayer assistance appointment line. But not everybody works that line.

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Tom Temin
Right. So they can have fewer licenses than employees but still have enough licenses, in other words.

Carl Aley
Yes.

Tom Temin
And you had some general recommendations here. Let’s review those quickly.

Carl Aley
The IRS actually has agreed to take some corrective actions for all of these, we have five recommendations. I mentioned a couple of them allocating the software, setting up a menu that allows taxpayers to call her to go directly to somebody who can assist them. And then in the tax themselves, just some of our observations during our visits for the improvements in the execution of the assistance, specifically that some triage procedures so that they can move people through the line a little bit faster. Additional training, and then some quality assurance, corrective actions to assist, well it’s sharing information with other groups within the IRS. They generally take corrective action based on quality reviews. What they could do a little bit better job of sharing those results across the IRS so others can benefit those from those corrective actions.

Tom Temin
And earlier, you mentioned that the wait time sometimes stretched out to three to seven hours. That’s like going to a bad doctor almost where that happens. That must have been something. Our schedules, our appointments by on a schedule or just that day, you can come in?

Carl Aley
On the Saturday, there were no scheduled appointments. So that three to seven hour wait, those long wait times those were on the Saturdays, no appointments, it was long lines out the door. In some cases, as I said, people waiting outside. When you schedule an appointment, typically wouldn’t have that, you would walk in at your scheduled time and meet with the IRS employee at the TAC. So the Saturdays were unique and no appointments.

Tom Temin
It sounds like there’s some really major programmatic insight in that phenomenon, I would say.

Carl Aley
It’s a couple things probably driving that. Saturday hours people are working during the week. So you have more folks that would be available potentially that wouldn’t otherwise be able to go in. And then as I said, no appoints were necessary. So you didn’t have to schedule something in advance. It could take you, I believe in FY 2023, It was about 14 days to get an appointment if you call the TAC. Whereas obviously, if you walk in, you’re hoping you see somebody that day.

Tom Temin
And just a final question, with respect to when someone does phone in. Is the agent receiving the call able to access information about that taxpayer or they just answer general questions based on tax law?

Carl Aley
Yes, they can they can access the taxpayers account. And they can they use what’s called an interactive tax law assistant, which allows them to kind of walk through, based on how the taxpayer response to the questions that the CSR would ask them, the customer service rep would ask them.

Tom Temin
In general, the IRS you said agreed with your recommendations this time around.

Carl Aley
Yes, they agreed with all five recommendations.

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