IRS Performance Sees Some Improvement This Year, Investigators Find

The Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) tax filing season performance is a key indicator of how well IRS serves taxpayers, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). This year’s filing season was expected to be risky because of tax system changes, including the telephone excise tax refund (TETR) which can be requested by all individuals and entities that paid the excise tax, says GAO, which is the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress.

IRS’s interim filing season performance is improved in some areas, GAO says. The number of individual income tax returns processed to date is comparable to last year, and the number filed electronically is almost 6 percent greater, it says.

"Taxpayers’ ability to reach an IRS telephone assistor was somewhat less than last year, but the accuracy of answers to taxpayers’ questions was about the same," the report says. "Use of IRS’s Web site increased, important because it is available 24 hours a day and is less costly than some other types of assistance," GAO says.

Other areas still require IRS improvement, the investigators find.

"Taxpayers’ use of the Free File program, which provides free tax preparation and electronic filing through IRS’s Web site—is 5.2 percent below last year at this time. Also, the Customer Account Data Engine (CADE), a modern tax return processing system, became operational 2 months behind schedule. IRS still expects to post 17 -19 million taxpayer accounts to CADE, which is about two and a half times more than last year," GAO says.

Tax systems changes have not had a significant effect on filing season performance. For example, IRS has received a fraction of the TETR-related telephone calls it expected to date, the report says.

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