Dive Brief:

• The Internal Revenue Service expanded its callback option for the 2024 tax season, giving taxpayers an option to avoid long hold times when they call the IRS. It piloted callbacks during the 2022 tax season.
• Taxpayers had “less than 1 in 5 chance of getting through to the IRS” when they called in 2022, IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel said at ACT-IAC CX Summit in Arlington, Virginia, last Thursday. Average wait times went up to 28 minutes that year, too. 
• “In our call center, we have put in a callback option,” Werfel said. “If our system believes your wait time is 15 minutes or longer, you will have the option to hang up and we’ll call you back.”

Dive Insight:

The callback option is just one part of a paradigm shift underway at the IRS to revamp the agency and improve taxpayers’ experiences. The IRS is looking to demonstrate “that the old IRS is not the new IRS,” Werfel said. 

For a decade, Congress cut funding to the IRS, which serves over 160 million individual taxpayers, as the tax code has become more complex. That changed last year, when the IRS got an infusion of money via the Inflation of Reduction Act. Now the agency has 10 years and $80 billion to build back the IRS. 

The IRS can’t simplify the tax code, but it can make it easier for taxpayers to reach the IRS, the commissioner said.

The agency’s top priority is to make it easier for taxpayers to reach the IRS any way they choose, whether that’s in walk-in centers, on the phone or on the web.

Part of that need is updating its digital offerings. “We want a paper-free IRS,” Werfel said, an effort the agency wants to accomplish by 2025. 

While there are easy fixes to improving its customer experience, Werfel said foundational technological initiatives would take more time to implement. Installing a call-back option was “an easy fix,” according to Werfel. 

The trial callback option saved taxpayers 1.7 million hours of hold time in 2022, according to IRS Chief Taxpayer Experience Officer Ken Corbin.

“We like to say, the era of listening to elevator music to get a hold of the IRS is over,” Werfel said.

MaryAnn Monroe, VP of total experience at Maximus, says a callback option is a small thing that can make a big difference in improving taxpayers’ interactions with the IRS.

“That really helps decrease the frustration that you or I might feel in waiting for many, many minutes to speak to somebody in person,” Monroe told CX Dive. “Rather we can get that phone call or that callback at a time that's most convenient to us in our day.”