Dispatches From the IRS Customer-Service Line
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Here's your Money Briefing for Thursday, May 26th. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. Have you ever needed to contact the IRS for assistance? Good luck. A huge backlog has made getting through on the phone almost impossible. So when our tax reporter Laura Saunders needed help herself recently regarding her own taxes, she decided to go to her local IRS office in person.
Whew. It took four and a half hours just to get off the line on the street and get up to the waiting room. And then I had to wait another hour just about to be helped.
Coming up, Laura will take us through her experience with the IRS, and she'll discuss the best ways for you to get in touch with the IRS besides, well, spending hours in a line. That's after the break.
This podcast is brought to you by ReliaQuest. Cyber criminals are constantly attacking. They want your data. They want your identity. They want your innovation. ReliaQuest fortifies your business with agentic defense, AI that detects, contains, and eliminates cyber threats in minutes. It helps your security team move faster at the work that matters most to protect the business now and delivers insights to help them predict what's next. ReliaQuest, agentic defense for the enterprise. Learn more at ReliaQuest.com. That's R-E-L-I-A-Q-U-E-S-T.com.
They say the only guarantees in life are death and taxes. Well, these days you can add a bullet point to that first one, headaches from trying to reach the IRS. Millions of Americans have had to navigate a maze of challenges getting answers about their taxes, and among them was WSJ tax reporter Laura Saunders. So how was her recent experience with Uncle Sam? She joins us now to talk about it. Laura, thank you so much for being here.
Why is the IRS customer service crisis making it hard to reach help on the phone?
Oh, and thank you for having me.
So, Laura, you've been with us before talking about the customer service issues the IRS has been dealing with. How bad has it gotten?
Well, it's gotten really bad. It was never great. Right now, I think they have about 9 million unprocessed tax returns from 2020 and 2021. And there's been a lot of underfunding. However, COVID just really knocked the IRS for a loop. And that's partly because people had to work from home and things like that, but also because Congress gave the IRS so much extra work to do during the pandemic. There were three rounds of stimulus payments, and then they changed the law on unemployment compensation, and the IRS in the middle of tax season had to go back and go through returns and give people refunds based on that. And there was also an extra child tax credit. So their plate has been more than full.
Well, you experienced these problems firsthand a few weeks ago when you went to an IRS office to have a personal tax issue resolved and you wound up waiting in line for a really long time. So let's talk about what that was like, starting with why were you there in the first place? You know, couldn't you have made an appointment?
Well, I would have liked to make an appointment, but that was impossible because the IRS can't answer its phones. And every person who was there with me had tried to get the IRS on the phone, and they couldn't do it either. In fact, the National Taxpayer Advocate says that only about one out of ten callers gets through to the IRS. My problem, by the way, was that they needed me to verify my identity in order to release my refund. apparently something in my tax return tripped a filter and they just wanted to make sure that I was who I was. And so I couldn't get them on the phone to do that, although that's an option.
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