IRS lowers phone service targets after falling short on filing season hiring goals

The IRS is lowering expectations for how many taxpayer calls it will answer during this year’s filing season, after falling short of several goals to increase frontline staffing.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, in a report publicly released Tuesday, said the IRS is lowering its telephone level of service target from 85% to 70%.

The level-of-service metric the IRS has used for more than 20 years only accounts for about a quarter of the agency’s total call volume, and doesn’t fully reflect its responsiveness to taxpayers.

According to another IRS watchdog, the National Taxpayer Advocate, when the agency achieved a 60% level of service in fiscal 2025, that translated into 26% of callers actually speaking with an IRS employee.

]]>

IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank Bisignano announced last week that the IRS will replace the level-of-service phone metric it’s been using for more than 20 years with a measurement that “will allow us to more accurately capture how the IRS serves taxpayers today.”

In addition to overseeing day-to-day operations at the IRS, Bisignano also serves as the head of the Social Security Administration.

‘A more difficult filing season’

Larry Gibbs, the IRS commissioner during the Reagan administration, said major tax law changes under the One, Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law last summer mean “it’s going to be a more difficult filing season.”

“It is really serious when the coverage goes down during a year when changes have been made in the tax law. It means that taxpayers have to wait 30 minutes to an hour-and-a half to get their calls answered by the IRS. If the IRS will answer the calls, sometimes they’re put on hold and just automatically clicked off,” Gibbs said.

The IRS, in most cases, gives taxpayers the option to request a callback, rather than remain on hold. But Gibbs said it can take days for the IRS to call taxpayers back.

“These are taxpayers that are trying to comply with their tax obligations. If taxpayers can’t get answers, they guess,” Gibbs said. “They guess about, ‘Well, how do I do it? Am I doing it right?’ That’s a real problem for the Internal Revenue Service. Telephone coverage and changes in the law, inadequate advice to taxpayers about the impact of the changes on them are very serious problems during the filing season.”

The IRS filing season began Monday, but the agency faces the risk of another government shutdown on Friday.

]]>

Senate Democrats are looking to vote on five remaining spending bills and put a spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security on hold, following the fatal shooting of a Department of Veterans Affairs nurse by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis.

Senate Republicans remain set on plans to vote once for all six spending bills, including DHS funding. The continuing resolution keeping some agencies funded at current levels runs out on Jan. 30.

John Koskinen, an IRS commissioner during the Obama administration, said the agency “certainly has its challenges,” with the sudden loss this year of tens of thousands of employees, many of them senior managers and executives.

“On top of that, there is the challenge of implementing for this filing season the tax-law changes of the Big Beautiful Bill passed last summer. And the shutdown didn’t help, with another one threatened now,” Koskinen said. “In short, if the employees pull this filing season off without any major challenges, it will be a great credit to them.”

National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins, in a report released Wednesday, told Congress that the IRS may be more productive by setting a lower level-of-service target.

In recent years, the IRS set an 85% level of service target and staffed its phone lines to meet demand at peak call times. But Collins said that means phone lines are “substantially overstaffed” at non-peak times, and that call service representatives have spent as much as 34% of their time “simply waiting for the phone to ring.”

“It is not practical to eliminate all idle time, but if the IRS set a lower [level of service] goal, it would get more bang for the buck; [accounts management] employees would have considerably less idle time and would resolve more taxpayer issues more quickly,” Collins wrote.

The IRS and the Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The IRS, as part of an executive order last year, is phasing out paper refund checks. Taxpayers who do not provide direct deposit information may experience “significant refund delays.”

]]>

The agency is also taking about two years to resolve self-reported identity theft cases — a delay that Collins called “unconscionable.”

TIGTA warned that the agency may not be able to deliver a consistent level of in-person tax help at its Taxpayer Assistance Centers across the country.

Last month, about 35 of the agency’s 360 free in-person tax assistance centers were closed. TIGTA wrote that the operating status of these centers “can vary day-to-day due to illness, staff leaving, or staff taking other positions within the IRS.”

“Reductions in the number of open TAC offices could potentially result in fewer taxpayers being served during the 2026 filing season,” TIGTA wrote.

The IRS had been chipping away at pandemic-era backlogs, but TIGTA found some of those backlogs are growing again, after the longest government shutdown last year and major cuts to the IRS workforce.

TIGTA wrote that the backlog will carry over into this year’s filing season and “may affect the IRS’s ability to timely process tax returns during the filing season, especially with reduced staff.”

“This could result in delays in taxpayers receiving refunds and could result in the IRS paying interest,” the IRS watchdog wrote.

IRS falls short of hiring goals

Collins wrote that the IRS saw a 27% staffing reduction last year, including a 22% reduction in customer service representatives, and that taxpayers may see delays during this year’s filing season because of those staffing cuts.

“Many departing employees were experienced workers whose institutional knowledge and technical expertise cannot easily be replaced,” she wrote.

The IRS has direct-hire authority, meaning it can fill essential positions for the filing season faster than the federal hiring process would normally allow. But despite this fast-track hiring, TIGTA found the IRS fell short of its hiring goals because of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, and a new requirement for IRS and Treasury Department leaders to approve hiring decisions.

According to TIGTA, the IRS must now get approval from Bisignano and Treasury Department leadership before posting job announcements. Bisignano and Treasury must also approve candidates selected by the IRS before making a job offer.

With the government shutdown and new vetting procedures, the IRS fell short of its hiring goals for the filing season and reduced the amount of training that new hires receive before assisting taxpayers.

TIGTA found that the IRS, at the end of calendar year 2025, filled only 2% of submission processing positions it was approved to hire for this year’s filing season. The agency made about 50 new hires — including tax examiners and clerks — but was approved to fill 2,200 submission processing positions. These employees process original and amended tax returns, and resolve tax return errors.

IRS managers told TIGTA it takes between 60 and 80 days to train new accounts management employees, and that some new hires may not be ready to handle questions from taxpayers calling the IRS during this year’s filing season. Submission processing managers told the watchdog office that they plan to continue onboarding new hires during the filing season.

The IRS posted job announcements for submission processing positions during last year’s government shutdown, but it could not conduct in-person direct hiring events during the funding lapse. The agency held an in-person hiring event in January 2026.

TIGTA found that the IRS met 66% of its hiring goal for accounts management employees who generally answer taxpayer calls and mail. These employees also make some processing adjustments to tax accounts and some amended tax returns.

IRS leadership in accounts management said they would onboard new hires no later than Aug. 31, 2025, to ensure employees were fully trained in time for the filing season. But they didn’t get hiring approval from IRS and Treasury leadership until August, limiting the amount of training that new hires received.

According to TIGTA, new hires in accounts management are typically trained to answer questions from individual taxpayers and individual amended tax return questions. “Now, they are only being trained to screen calls, i.e., route them to the right assistor, and answer basic questions on refunds,” the IRS watchdog wrote.

Accounts management leaders told TIGTA that they plan to increase overtime usage throughout the fiscal year to “mitigate any negative impact of their hiring shortfall.”

The IRS also lacks permanent leadership. The agency doesn’t have a permanent commissioner, and Bisignano, who oversees SSA and the IRS, spends about two days a week at the tax agency, according to the New York Times.

The IRS announced a new slate of executives to lead the agency last week. But in mid-November, a majority of the 28 leadership positions the IRS considers “top officials” were vacant or filled by acting officials.

“The loss of experienced managers has been mirrored throughout the agency and inevitably affects planning, coordination, and execution during filing season,” Collins wrote.

Modernization projects meant to offset staffing losses are not ready

The IRS has launched several modernization initiatives to offset major staffing losses, but TIGTA wrote that those projects “may not yield expected benefits” during this year’s filing season.

The agency, through its Zero Paper Initiative, is trying to digitize incoming paper tax returns and correspondence to reduce processing times.  As of December 2025, TIGTA found that four contractors hired by the IRS to digitize paper tax returns processed about 379,000 of the agency’s 10.7 million paper returns — about 4% of its inventory.

Collins said outsourcing the processing of paper tax returns may reduce processing times, but “introduces operational and confidentiality risks,” considering most of the contractors hired have never worked with the IRS before.

“It was just a few years ago that an employee of an IRS contractor, Charles Littlejohn, stole the return information of thousands of taxpayers and sent it to media outlets,” Collins wrote.

The IRS is also developing Taxpayer 360, a project that will use artificial intelligence tools to help employees provide more comprehensive assistance to taxpayers. TIGTA wrote that the project is delayed because of the shutdown and “resource prioritization and realignment.”

The IRS planned to have Taxpayer 360 available to at least 5,000 accounts management employees assisting taxpayers during this fiscal year. But TIGTA wrote that users in the pilot program are reporting bugs, along with issues that “require remediation before a larger-scale release.”

The IRS faces a $1.1 billion, or nearly 9% budget cut from current spending levels in a spending bill that’s a Senate vote away from becoming law. The same spending package would also further chip away at the agency’s multi-year modernization funding. Lawmakers included the rescission of $11.6 billion in Inflation Reduction Act funds for the IRS in the final fiscal 2026 spending bill package.

The IRS agency initially got $80 billion under the Inflation Reduction Act to rebuild its depleted workforce and modernize some of the oldest legacy IT systems in the federal government. But by the end of the Biden administration, those funds were cut roughly in half.

If you would like to contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email jheckman@federalnewsnetwork.com, or reach out on Signal at jheckman.29

Copyright
© 2026 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.