IRS Improved Taxpayer Experience This Filing Season

As we highlighted last week, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will be leveraging its $80 billion in funding increase from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to improving the taxpayer experience.

Much of this will focus on addressing wait times for IRS phone lines, better processing of paper tax returns, enhanced electronic filing, as well as the ability for taxpayers to quickly identify mistakes.

According to a recent press release from the Department of Treasury, there has already been a marked improvement in servicing taxpayers this filing season.

Here’s the breakdown of these improvements:

• The IRS achieved 87 percent level of service, exceeding the original goal of 85 percent.

• The agency answered 2 million more calls through live assistance.

• Phone wait times were cut to four minutes from 27 minutes.

• More than 100,000 taxpayers were helped in-person.

• There were 80 times more digitized returns than in 2022.

• The agency cleared the backlog of unprocessed 2022 individual tax returns with no errors.

• A new direct-deposit refund option was enabled this filing season.

According to this recent Federal News Network article, in fiscal year 2023, the IRS has so far spent $838 million, which is only around 1 percent of the $80 billion IRA funding. The article also highlighted how the IRS is on track to become a 21st-century agency that allows taxpayers to obtain more services and help online.

With a significant amount of the $80 billion funding still available, it seems that the IRS is on the right track to modernizing its systems and capabilities to best meet the needs of all taxpayers.

Makpar is excited to see the tremendous strides that the IRS is making when it comes to improving the taxpayer experience. Contact us here for more information on how we can help you start your government CX journey.