The IRS should be more transparent in communicating its telephone service metrics by including in the metrics more phone lines that taxpayers call and by covering the entire fiscal year and not just the filing season, an agency watchdog said in a report.
The IRS reported a level of service (LOS) of 88% and wait times averaging three minutes for the 2024 filing season. The LOS calculates the percentage of calls to the IRS’s accounts management (AM) phone lines that are answered by a live assistor.
But those metrics only included calls made to the 33 staffed AM telephone lines, which handled about two-thirds of all calls answered by IRS, according to the report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).
Another issue is that the average speed of answer — the average time that it takes an IRS telephone assistor to answer a call in the queue — does not represent the total time that a taxpayer or tax practitioner spends on a telephone call, TIGTA said. Read more.