Tax Administration: IRS' 1999 Tax Filing Season Page: 66 of 84
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Chapter 10
Conclusions, Recommendations, and Agency
CommentsConclusions
A successful filing season requires that IRS effectively manage a wide
range of programs, through which it assists taxpayers in meeting their
filing requirements; processes filed returns and related tax payments; and
takes certain steps to help ensure that taxpayers' refund claims, especially
those involving the EIC, are valid. There were many positive
accomplishments during the 1999 filing season. IRS expanded the
availability of walk-in services, stopped hundreds of millions of dollars in
erroneous EIC payments, saw a sizable increase in electronic filing, and
implemented a major new processing system without significant
disruption. However, there were also some problems-the most important
being a significant decline in telephone service despite IRS' efforts to
improve that service.IRS officials cited several factors that contributed to the decline in
telephone service, some of which might be due to IRS' inexperience with
its new way of managing telephone operations and its new call routing
technology. However, other factors, such as inadequate planning and
decisionmaking that appeared to be based on inadequate data or that
seemed to ignore existing data, may be symptomatic of basic management
weaknesses or challenges. To better understand the challenges facing IRS
and better position ourselves to propose constructive solutions, we are
reviewing, in more detail, IRS' management of its telephone operations.
Thus, we are making no telephone-related recommendations in this report.
In addition to the decline in access to the telephone system, the quality of
answers that taxpayers received when they reached an IRS assistor also
dropped. IRS recognizes the need to provide further training to its
assistors, and officials said there are plans to do so before the start of the
2000 filing season. That training should help improve quality. We also
identified some features of IRS' methodology for measuring quality during
the 1999 filing season that warranted IRS' attention. For example, IRS
monitored about 31 percent fewer telephone calls than provided for in its
sampling plan, which could affect the precision of IRS' estimates of quality.
With respect to our other concerns about IRS' methodology, IRS has
agreed to examine the effect of cluster sampling on the precision of its
estimates and has extended the hours during which it is monitoring calls.
Even with the increase in monitoring hours, IRS' measure of quality might
still provide different results than it would if all hours were monitored.
Besides expanding the availability of walk-in services in 1999, IRS did a
better job of measuring customer satisfaction with those services.
However, it made little progress in measuring service quality and
timeliness. Without meaningful nationwide performance data, IRS cannotGAO/GGD-00-37 IRS' 1999 Tax Filing Season
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United States. General Accounting Office. Tax Administration: IRS' 1999 Tax Filing Season, report, December 15, 1999; Washington D.C.. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc292866/m1/66/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.