Internal Revenue Service (IRS) phone call wait times have been going down relative to recent years. Productivity has also been going up, and the backlog of tax returns that swamped the agency following the pandemic has been easing, a recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found.
Average call wait times decreased to three minutes during the 2023 filing season from 28 minutes in 2022, and the IRS answered 65 percent more calls last year than it did in the year before, according to the GAO’s 2023 filing report released in February.
A new, free online tax filing tool is available this year on the IRS website. Known as Direct File, the pilot is available in 12 states including New York, California, Texas, Florida and Washington, and can make suggestions to taxpayers about the best way to fill out their returns.
IRS announced Tuesday new functionality for the direct file service, which will be able to pull taxpayers’ adjusted gross income from previous years.
Beware of tax scams proliferating across cyberspace. Some of these are perpetrated by outright fraudsters in the form of bogus text messages and emails while others occupy a gray area of shady advertising and self-interested business advice.
Enforcement agencies are targeting automated scams that are throwing taxpayers for a loop, with one recent action by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) going after a fake robocall campaign by Veriwave Telco known as the “National Tax Relief Program.”
The Hill’s Tobias Burns has more here.
