In Boston, new IRS commissioner promises a new experience for taxpayers
'The process takes way too long'
'The process takes way too long'
'The process takes way too long'
The IRS has had a difficult stretch, ever since the pandemic led to a massive backlog of unprocessed paper returns which took years to clear. Taxpayers couldn't get answers, largely because customer service agents were impossible to reach.
But now the agency has a new leader, and he's promising a new, much different IRS that he says could be unrecognizable to Americans. Commissioner Danny Werfel is in Boston for a few days, in part to visit the agency's facility in Andover — one of the largest in the country — and he sat down with NewsCenter 5 for a wide-ranging interview.
"We had, by all measures, a very successful filing season," Werfel said, fresh off his first full tax filing season.
He's not wrong. Statistics about the IRS's customer service from the National Taxpayer Advocate are heading in the right direction. During the pandemic, the agency answered just 11 percent of its phone calls. That number has risen to 29 percent, but Werfel says it’s significantly higher for the main IRS phone number.
"If you look at the main phone line for the IRS, that's our 1040 line. That's where 80 to 90 percent of all the calls come in. We answered nearly nine of 10 calls that came in. Our wait time was down to three minutes," Werfel said. "But there's more work to do. We have other phone lines that are lagging behind in terms of customer service."
The pandemic processing delays mostly involved paper returns, those filed by mail. Numerous taxpayers who had their returns held up say they wouldn't have filed on paper but were forced to by the IRS's antiquated systems. The taxpayer advocate says somewhere between 150 and 200 forms are still not able to be e-filed.
"We are working to make every correspondence in every form uploadable digitally," Werfel said. "By next year, we'll have something like 80 percent of all the volume that runs through the IRS available to do electronically."
Thanks to a $60 billion boost the IRS got from President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, Werfel says taxpayers will see a much more modern agency in the next few years.
"It shouldn't look largely the same. We will have failed if it looks largely the same," he said. "It should feel no different in interacting with the IRS than with your favorite bank and your online banking solution. Everything should be at your fingertips."
One of the first steps on that road is the agency's Direct File program, which allowed taxpayers with relatively simple returns in Massachusetts and a handful of other states to use the IRS's own website for their taxes. After a successful pilot, that program is rolling out nationwide next year.
But there are still plenty of other problems to fix, including taxpayer identity theft, which is when someone files taxes in someone else's name and makes off with their refund. The average resolution time for those cases is 19 months.
"The process takes way too long to get right," Werfel said. "This is why we're hiring. We need more IRS personnel that can help the long line of people who are waiting to get their taxes corrected and their records corrected because they've been a victim."
Among the locations where the IRS is hiring is at their facility on Interstate 93 in Andover.