If you need help with your taxes, good luck reaching an IRS representative on the telephone, The Washington Post reported. So far this tax season, only about 1 out of every 50 calls have gotten through to an IRS customer service representative on the agency’s 1040 toll-free line (800-829-1040), according to Erin M. Collins, the national taxpayer advocate for the independent Taxpayer Advocate Service. Collins praised the IRS for soldiering through a tough tax season compounded by a pandemic, but she also outlined major concerns with how the agency is handling taxpayer calls and returns. “From a taxpayer’s perspective, it feels like their return has fallen into a black hole: they do not know what is going on, when they will get their refund, why it is being delayed, or how to get answers or help,” Collins wrote in a recent blog post. This filing season, the IRS has seen an increase of over 300 percent in calls to its Accounts Management toll-free lines, Collins said. But IRS employees had answered just 2 percent of the more than 70 million taxpayer calls to the 1040 telephone line as of April 10. On average, people spend 20 minutes on hold, although many taxpayers have reported much longer wait times. Others just give up and hang up. Collins also highlighted the IRS’s huge backlog of tax returns. The agency has designated more than 29 million returns for manual processing, she said. Even when people do reach an IRS representative, it’s unlikely the worker can provide help or guidance if the person’s return hasn’t been processed yet, Collins said. This tornado of a tax season is due to a perfect storm — a high volume of 2020 tax returns that need manual processing, a huge backlog of unprocessed 2019 paper tax returns and the daunting task of issuing hundreds of millions of stimulus payments along with the Treasury Department. The IRS also suffers from limited resources and technology issues, Collins said.
