An article in Tax Notes Today Federal reported that Ken Corbin, the IRS’s taxpayer experience officer and Wage and Investment Division Commissioner, stated that the IRS was now answering phone calls to the practitioner helpline in under 10 minutes.  Mr. Corbin made this statement in a virtual event hosted by the California Society of Enrolled Agents on January 18, 2023.[1]

Mr. Corbin is cited as stating that the agency is transitioning a workforce of over 12,000 employees back to answering phones.[2]

The article also notes that Mr. Corbin gave some credit for the improvement to the IRS program looking to reduce the effectiveness of robocalling systems:

Asked by an audience member whether wait times have also been reduced by an IRS initiative to curb robocalls, Corbin said those efforts have played a role. The agency in October 2022 announced plans to use an artificial-intelligence-based tool to weed out calls from phone-queue-jumping services like those offered by enQ Inc.

“We did fix the voice bots,” Corbin said. “There were a couple of challenges . . . but we made some improvements to the system. We updated that at the end of the year.”[3]

Finally, the article notes that the IRS has eliminated a previous policy that restricted practitioners to discussing five taxpayer accounts per call, though the article did not indicate how many accounts now could be discussed by tax practitioners in a single call.[4]

[1] Kristen A. Parillo, “Wait Times Falling for Practitioner Helpline,” Tax Notes Today Federal, January 19, 2023, https://www.taxnotes.com/tax-notes-today-federal/tax-system-administration/wait-times-falling-practitioner-helpline/2023/01/19/7fw7m (subscription required, retrieved January 20, 2023)

[2] Kristen A. Parillo, “Wait Times Falling for Practitioner Helpline,” Tax Notes Today Federal, January 19, 2023

[3] Kristen A. Parillo, “Wait Times Falling for Practitioner Helpline,” Tax Notes Today Federal, January 19, 2023

[4] Kristen A. Parillo, “Wait Times Falling for Practitioner Helpline,” Tax Notes Today Federal, January 19, 2023