IRS misses 2001 telephone customer service goals

Taxpayers who called the IRS last year for help waited longer to speak to agency representatives than they did during the 2000 tax filing season, according to a new report from the General Accounting Office. Despite the agency's continued efforts to improve customer service over the phone, taxpayers remained on hold an average of approximately 36 seconds longer during the 2001 tax filing season than they did in 2000, GAO reported. Although the IRS slightly improved its response rate to the number of phone calls it received during the 2001 tax season, it failed to meet its 2001 performance targets for providing taxpayers with correct answers to their questions. "Overall, IRS made limited progress in the 2001 tax-filing season toward its goal of providing world-class telephone service," said the report, "IRS Telephone Assistance: Limited Progress and Missed Opportunities to Analyze Performance in the 2001 Filing Season (GAO-02-212). GAO studied eight performance measures that evaluate the agency's effectiveness in dealing with customers over the phone, including wait time, response rate and accuracy. Since 1999, the agency's toll-free telephone service has provided tax assistance to people 24 hours a day, seven days a week, through 26 call centers across the country. Approximately 10,000 customer service representatives field questions from taxpayers on everything from tax law to refunds. During the 2001 tax-filing season, the IRS received approximately 70 million calls from taxpayers on its three toll-free help lines and answered more than 50 million of those calls. IRS employees fielded about 22 million calls, while automated systems responded to the rest. The number of callers who hung up while waiting to speak to an IRS representative dropped 4 percent in the 2001 tax-filing season despite the longer wait, according to the report. GAO criticized the IRS for failing to correctly analyze the performance data of its telephone assistance service. "Field directors sometimes reached conclusions about the factors affecting access and accuracy without conducting analyses to test their conclusions," the report said. For example, many of the directors interviewed by GAO said a higher than usual attrition rate and computer problems affected performance during the 2001 tax filing season, but only two of those officials identified a specific analysis to support those conclusions, the report said. Although GAO acknowledged that some performance analyses are costly to conduct, it identified some inexpensive ways the agency could evaluate the effectiveness of the telephone service program. The report suggested that agency directors could have analyzed the impact of high attrition among IRS customer support representatives on access and accuracy by monitoring a sample of phone calls fielded by experienced and inexperienced employees to compare error rates and average handling time. "To speed progress toward its long-term goal, IRS managers need to identify the causes for performance, plan strategies to improve performance and evaluate how well those strategies worked," the report said. GAO recommended that the IRS require field directors to develop written plans to collect and analyze data to test their conclusions about factors affecting performance. The report called on IRS Commissioner Charles O. Rossotti to ensure that agency managers follow IRS guidance on analyzing the factors that affect performance and evaluating efforts at improvement, including training. Rossotti agreed with GAO's findings and recommendations, but also highlighted the improvements the agency has made in customer service in the past few years. "Service provided for tax law, accounts and refunds for the January-June period exceeded the prior year by 6.7 million, or a 38 percent increase," Rossotti said in a letter to GAO. The IRS also enhanced its Spanish-language assistance program, expanding its Puerto Rico call site and increasing its service to Spanish-speaking customers by 42 percent, according to Rossotti. Rossotti also pointed out that the agency's phone assistance program is only one part of the IRS' overall customer service strategy. The agency's Web site and its walk-in tax assistance centers also provide customers with important tax information, he said.