IRS Workforce Ready for Filing Season

WASHINGTON – As tax filing season opens today, a nationwide team of trained IRS professionals are on duty, ready to answer taxpayer questions, process returns and issue refunds.

"Throughout the filing season and beyond, IRS employees are focused on delivering a smooth filing season where individuals, businesses and tax practitioners get the best service possible and the agency successfully collects the revenue that pays the country’s bills,” said NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald.

The IRS collects 96 percent of the government’s revenue by administering the tax code as passed by Congress. The process involves handling about 140 million income tax returns and over 5 billion information forms, according to the National Taxpayer Advocate, and receiving about 100 million telephone calls a year.

“With the necessary investments provided by Congress, the IRS has put more staffing and resources exactly where American taxpayers need them: improving customer service levels, updating technology in ways that make interactions with the IRS easier and catching those who try to cheat the system,” Greenwald said.

By augmenting the customer service workforce, the IRS was able to answer nearly 9 million more phone calls in FY 2024 than in FY 2022 and cut in half the amount of time taxpayers had to wait to speak to an IRS employee. The average time to respond to written taxpayer correspondence to the agency also dropped by half over the same period.

The IRS has increased accessibility to Taxpayer Assistance Centers (TACs) around the country for those who prefer in-person help. In FY 2024, 1.9 million people were served at TACs, up from 1.3 million in FY 2022.

Building on the progress of the last two years, the IRS is again offering customer service tools such as expanding the call back feature to reduce wait times on the phone; improving the online tool to check refund status; accelerating the transition to paperless processing; and expanding the Direct File service for certain taxpayers to file their returns online directly with the IRS.

“Despite the demoralizing rhetoric leveled at the federal workforce in the last few weeks, the American people should know that the frontline IRS employees in every state are committed to the agency mission, no matter what,” Greenwald said.

NTEU represents employees in 37 federal agencies and offices.