Tax season wrapped earlier today for most taxpayers. While the data is still coming in, IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel has already deemed it “one of the best tax seasons the nation has seen in years.”
Werfel delivered the message as part of an end-of-filing season message. He also touted other improvements, including increased hours at walk-in sites, assisting 170,000 more taxpayers in person than the IRS helped a year ago.
Improvements to the IRS website resulted in 75 million more visits than last year, reporting nearly 500 million visits, an 18% increase. Not surprisingly, “Where’s My Refund?” accounted for more than 275 million of those visits.
IRS Phone Service
Werfel says that the IRS call centers were working at peak efficiency helping taxpayers, answering over one million more taxpayer calls than the agency answered a year ago—a 16% increase from 2023—and three million more calls than the IRS answered in 2022.
Continuing a trend seen last year, the IRS reported an 88% level of service on the main phone lines. This is a five-fold increase in 2022 when the level of service was 15%.
The “level of service” is the number you get when you divide the number of taxpayers who reach a live assistor by the number of calls the IRS system routes to live assistors. That means that the 15% level of service from 2022 only accounted for calls that made it into the queue—calls routed for automated assistance and callers who hang up before they are placed in a queue are excluded from the formula.
Werfel also reported that callers to the IRS experienced faster response times on the main phone lines. Instead of a 27-minute wait in 2022, the IRS answered calls, on average, in just over 3 minutes.
And the callback option—my favorite new feature—is now available on 97% of IRS phone lines. The agency says it called back more than four million taxpayers this tax season, nearly double the number from a year ago, saving at least 1.4 million hours of wait time on the phones.
Other Improvements
The IRS saw more use of its virtual assistant tool (a fancy way of saying chatbot) on key IRS.gov pages. There were 832,000 uses this filing season, up nearly 150% from 2023.
(Read our story about TurboTax and AI here.)
The IRS also reported success at Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) and Tax Counseling for the Elderly (TCE) volunteer sites. VITA sites offer free tax help to people who need assistance preparing their tax returns, including those who generally make $64,000 or less, while the TCE program offers free tax help to individuals aged 60 or older. Those sites saw another strong year, preparing 2.3 million returns for free, up 200,000 from a year ago.
Werfel says, ” It’s clear that we’re seeing historic improvements in taxpayer service levels, and the agency is rebounding from some very tough and lean years during the past decade.” The Commissioner says these improvements are the result of the Inflation Reduction Act funding. The Act significantly boosted funding for the IRS, guaranteeing tens of millions of dollars over its operating budget for improvements and enforcement.
Messaging
This is consistent with Werfel’s messaging from less than a year ago.
But, Werfel says, “there should be no mistaking that we need to do more at the IRS.”
And the season isn’t over just yet.
Taxpayers in Maine and Massachusetts have until April 17 to file and pay taxes due this year. Those states observe the Patriots’ Day holiday on April 15 this year, and April 16 is the Emancipation Day holiday in the District of Columbia.
Additional taxpayers have extra time to file, and still others will file for extension. The IRS is expecting about 19 million taxpayers to file for an extension.
The Commissioner ended his remarks by thanking taxpayers for taking the time to file and pay their taxes, as well as the many people across the nation’s tax community who have helped.
“On behalf of all IRS employees,” he says, “thank you.”
