While far more people file electronically now, and the IRS has taken many steps to limit the need for taxpayers to phone the IRS, the demand for personal service hasn't decreased. In fact, over the past decade the number of calls the IRS received on its Accounts Management lines rose from about 64 million for fiscal year 2006 to about 102 million for fiscal year 2015. That’s almost a 60 percent jump, as shown in a chart from the report.
Automating customer service even more, the report says, “will mean only those with the means to pay for it can receive help with their taxes.” Delayed refunds due to antifraud filters
Some of the filters used by the IRS, while increasingly necessary to identify tax fraud, have a high false positive rate. That causes refund delays for hundreds of thousands of legitimate taxpayers. The filter that halts returns potentially tied to identify theft, for example, had a 36 percent rate of false positives last year, according to the report.
Compounding the hassle for taxpayers caught up in the filter's web was that they were asked to verify their identification over the phone or online. But for three straight weeks during last year’s filing season, fewer than 10 percent of taxpayer calls about those flagged returns were answered.