Telephone Assistance

Many taxpayers who seek help from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) by telephone are not getting it. Although IRS has improved its telephone assistance program, the agency's telephone management practices have not kept up with those of the Social Security Administration and four private firms surveyed by GAO. IRS employees answered about the same number of calls each year--about 36 million--even though the staff available to answer calls declined. IRS answered about one out of two calls in fiscal year 1989 but only about one out of four calls in fiscal year 1994. IRS has improved its telephone assistance program, particularly its ability to route calls among call sites and provide assistors with taxpayer account information. However, IRS lags in the application of modern information technology. However, GAO believes that IRS could adopt management practices used by other organizations to answer more calls with existing resources. GAO notes that IRS senior management has not aggressively and consistently pursued the implementation of commonly used practices. In part, these attempts failed because IRS lacked a strategy for working with the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents most IRS telephone assistance workers, to introduce systemwide operating practices and standards.

GAO found that IRS: (1) has not kept pace with the increasing number of calls received over fiscal years (FY) 1989 to 1994; (2) answered about the same number of calls each year, about 36 million, even though the telephone answering staff declined; (3) answered about one out of two calls in FY 1989, but only one out of four calls in FY 1994; (4) has improved its ability to route calls among call sites and provide assistors with taxpayers' account information; (5) telephone management practices have not kept pace with those of other organizations; (6) could apply additional telephone management practices to answer more calls with existing resources; (7) provides taxpayer telephone assistance to a much lesser extent than other organizations; (8) and the National Treasury Employment Union have reached an agreement to work together to implement the IRS Customer Service Vision, which is designed to optimize the number of taxpayer calls IRS answers; and (9) could take aggressive actions to better manage its existing resources to answer more calls.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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