Preface: Introductory Remarks by the National Taxpayer Advocate 2019

The Taxpayer First Act marks changes not just for the Taxpayer Advocate Service, but for the IRS as well. By passing the Taxpayer First Act, Congress has sent the IRS a clear message that it needs to rethink the way it operates — the services it provides, its organizational structure, the way it trains employees, and the technology it uses.

The IRS’s mission is to “[p]rovide America’s taxpayers top quality service by helping them understand and meet their tax responsibilities and enforce the law with integrity and fairness to all.” Currently the IRS is struggling on both fronts. Its current inability to meet taxpayers’ customer service needs results in an inability to enforce the law fairly for all taxpayers.

The President’s Management Agenda emphasizes the importance of high-quality customer service and cites the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) and the Forrester U.S. Federal CX Index™ as key benchmarks. Those indices find the IRS is among the lowest performing federal agencies when it comes to the customer experience. The ACSI report for 2018 ranks the Treasury Department tied for 10^th out of 12 federal departments and says that “most [IRS] programs score . . . well below both the economy-wide national ACSI average and the federal government average.” The 2019 Forrester report ranked the IRS as 13^th out of 15 federal agencies and characterized the IRS’s score as “very poor.”

As I will discuss below, funding constraints are a significant part of the problem. The IRS receives approximately 100 million telephone calls every year, and to provide “top quality service,” as its mission statement commits it to do, it requires adequate funding to hire enough employees to answer those calls. But the problems in IRS customer service go beyond just the budget.

While we support the IRS’s efforts to expand online accounts and communicate with taxpayers digitally, initiatives like those will not by themselves make the IRS into a customer-focused agency. To truly transform the organization, the IRS must start with a culture shift. If the culture of the organization is one where employees look to minimize interactions with taxpayers in an effort to move work, or where taxpayers who owe money are automatically viewed negatively, then expanding digital services will not improve customer service. The IRS needs to take a holistic view of how it operates and understand what is and is not working. Working collaboratively with TAS to understand what we are seeing in our cases is one of the best ways for the IRS to understand the pain points taxpayers experience and which processes are most likely to break down. Couple this information with a focus on training IRS employees on empathy and taxpayer interaction, as well as focusing on tracking customer service measures such as first contact resolution and fairness, and the IRS can begin the cultural change needed to fundamentally improve its approach to serving its customers.

However, the IRS’s shortcomings in its customer service also impact the agency’s ability to fairly administer the tax law. At the same time that the IRS is faced with reevaluating its customer service strategy, the Commissioner has placed a renewed focus on enforcement. TAS has been supportive of some of these efforts, particularly increased Revenue Officer hiring to help ensure the agency has a physical presence throughout the country. But this enforcement focus must be coupled with an improvement in taxpayer service within enforcement. If the IRS is going to go out into communities to talk to taxpayers who owe back taxes, then those same taxpayers need to be able to get answers to their questions when they call the IRS or have an indicator placed on their account to designate when they might be at risk of economic hardship before they set up a payment plan. To do otherwise will cause harm to those who can least afford it.