The Internal Revenue Service is making progress on its plans to recruit an additional 10,000 employees, signing up 4,000 customer service representatives to help the overloaded agency next tax season.
The IRS revealed its progress Thursday, saying the 4,000 new customer service reps would help answer the phones and provide other services. After coming under fire last tax season for long delays in answering calls and dealing with a backlog of millions of unprocessed tax returns left over from 2021, the IRS announced plans in March to hire 10,000 employees to help out (
The IRS has been holding job fairs and recruitment events and said the 4,000 assistors have been hired over the past several months and are now being trained to provide help to taxpayers, including answering phone questions.
"The IRS is fully committed to providing the best service possible, and we are moving quickly to use new funding to help taxpayers during the busy tax season," said outgoing IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig in a statement. "Our phone lines have been simply overwhelmed during the pandemic, and we have been unable to provide the help that IRS employees want to give and that the nation's taxpayers deserve. But help is on the way for taxpayers. As the newly hired employees are trained and move online in 2023, we will have more assistors on the phone than any time in recent history."
Rettig himself will be leaving the agency when his term ends in November, and the Biden administration has not yet named a replacement or who will be acting commissioner until a more permanent IRS commissioner is nominated and approved by the Senate. He will be in good company, as thousands of new employees will be needed to replace baby boomers who are expected to retire from the agency over the next few years.
The IRS said customer service representatives being hired are in various stages of being onboarded. When they join the agency, they will receive weeks of training to help serve people and improve the taxpayer experience. The training will cover a wide variety of issues including technical account management issues and understanding and respecting taxpayer rights.
The goal is to add another 1,000 customer service representatives by the end of the year, bringing the total of new hires in this area to 5,000.
Many of the new employees are expected to be in place for the start of the 2023 tax season, while others will join as their training is completed in the following weeks. Nearly all their training will be completed by Presidents Day 2023, which is typically the period when the IRS sees the highest phone volumes. The IRS expects its phones will be answered at a much higher level during the 2023 filing season. During fiscal year 2021, the IRS received a record 282 million calls, according to a
The IRS noted that improvements at the agency and the use of its new direct hire authority have speeded the hiring process. This year, 4,000 positions have been brought on since August, while last year, it took approximately eight months to hire customer service representatives.
"Even though we have new hires in the pipeline, our phone lines remain extremely busy," Rettig stated. "We continue to urge people to first visit IRS.gov for information related to their tax questions. Many of the questions we receive can be answered online, providing faster answers for people than calling."
In addition to hiring more phone reps, the IRS is also looking to bring in more people throughout the agency, not just in taxpayer service areas but in information technology and compliance positions as well.
