Opinion

WILFORD: The IRS Is Still A Mess — Except When It Needs You To Pay Up

Photo by Zach Gibson/Getty Images

Andrew Wilford Contributor
Font Size:

Covering the latest report of the National Taxpayer Advocate (NTA) to Congress, the Washington Post decided to frame it as a major victory for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome in rooting for the IRS aside, the Post’s framing badly misses the mark — the IRS is still in bad shape ahead of this year’s tax filing season.

At the end of last year, the IRS had a backlog of around 16 million returns left unprocessed. During 2022, they got it down to around 10 million by the year’s end.

If a decline is all it takes to declare victory, then sure the IRS is doing better this year. Yet while the Post may be inclined to celebrate, that’s still an absurd number of unprocessed returns nearly nine months after the end of the filing season. Even the improvement from last year is not particularly deserving of praise, particularly given the circumstances. Not only have pandemic pressures on the workforce eased, but the IRS has already begun to beef up its workforce in response to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed in the summer. 

In other words, a lower backlog is the bare minimum taxpayers should have expected. The Biden administration patting itself on the back for reducing the return backlog in far better circumstances would be a lot like the administration congratulating itself for “reducing the deficit” because temporary pandemic spending programs were winding down

Unfortunately, other taxpayer service metrics provide even less reason for optimism that the IRS has turned things around. Even as the number of phone calls the IRS received dropped from about 282 million in FY 2021 to 173 million in FY 2022, the response rate held steady at just 21 percent even including automated assistance. Just 13 percent of callers got through to a human.

The breakdown by the type of call reveals just how skewed the IRS’s priorities remain. Taxpayers calling into the lines that concern the IRS’s revenue intake like the Automated Collection Service and the Installment Agreement lines received a human response 43 percent of the time and 28 percent of the time, respectively. 

On the other hand, taxpayer service-focused lines like the Practitioner Priority Service, Taxpayer Protection Program, Individual Income Tax help, and Refund questions received human response rates of 16 percent, 11 percent, 10 percent, and 7 percent, respectively. It remains far easier to get in touch with the IRS if you want to discuss the IRS’s preferred topic of how you’re going to pay them.

Other taxpayer service metrics remain equally dismal. Taxpayers actually waited six minutes longer, on average, to get through to an IRS agent in 2022 when they did manage to than in 2021, with an average wait time of over 28 minutes. Meanwhile, taxpayers waited an average of 207 days to get a response to letters they sent to the IRS — also longer than the previous year. According to the NTA, the IRS still has a backlog of over 5 million pieces of taxpayer correspondence it needs to respond to.

All these issues are not going to be solved by the avalanche of cash Congress dropped on the IRS as part of the IRA. The IRS’s problems are far too institutional: reluctance to embrace new technologies, an ingrained tendency to view and treat all taxpayers as potential tax cheats, a “do as I say, not as I do” attitude that punishes taxpayers for minor faults while hand-waving its own, and a repeated habit of ignoring rules and procedures it finds inconvenient. Increased funding is more likely to magnify these issues than correct them.

So as we enter this year’s tax filing season, don’t expect much change to painfully long call wait times, correspondence sent to the IRS seemingly disappearing into a black hole, and backwards technology making everything more difficult than it needs to be. Expecting nothing from the IRS is still the best way to avoid being disappointed.

Andrew Wilford is a senior policy analyst with the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to tax and fiscal policy research and education at all levels of government.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.