Got a Tax Question? Don't Call the IRS

Customer service has cratered at the short-staffed, underfunded agency

- By David Hood, Allyson Versprille, and Kaustuv Basu, Illustration by Nadia Hafid, Taxpayer Advocate Service

Tax preparer Jan Roberg rang what she calls the “bat phone”: a dedicated customer service line at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service that’s supposed to connect professionals like her to a human right away. She was put on hold, as she figured she would be. So she went to the Burger King next to her office to pick up lunch.

She was still on hold when she got back. “Even five years ago, I would get through right away,” says Roberg, of St. Louis. Now it typically takes more than an hour.

Reaching the IRS has always been an exercise in patience. But years of budget cuts have pushed the agency to the limit. Its customer service workforce has shrunk more than 40%, to 11,027 full-time employees, since 2010, according to the most recent data, and the agency is struggling to fill vacancies amid a labor shortage—handcuffed by a federal pay scale that starts college graduates at little more than fast-food wages.

IRS representatives answered fewer than 1 in 10 phone calls during the 2021 tax-filing season, according to National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins, who heads an independent arm of the agency designed to help taxpayers resolve problems. Even in off-peak periods the agency is answering only about 4 in 10.

The main role of the IRS is, of course, to collect taxes. But during the Covid-19 pandemic it was also put in charge of doling out billions of dollars in direct checks and advance payments on the child tax credit. The agency received 24.6 million calls related to stimulus payments from when they were authorized in March 2020 to Nov. 28 of that year, according to the IRS’s internal watchdog.