The IRS sucks at a lot of things. Given.
Thankfully we have Treasury Inspector General of Tax Administration to inform us about said failures opportunities for improvement.
But today’s news that the IRS isn’t doing enough to help our hearing and speech-impaired friends is especially disheartening to the TIGTA overlords. They can (somewhat) understand providing crappy service to regular Americans (try reading the instructions people) but if you’re unfortunate enough to be without speech or hearing, the IG felt obligated to point out the IRS’s shortcomings:
TIGTA performed an audit to evaluate both the IRS’s customer service toll-free telephone access during the 2010 Filing Season and the access and service it provided to hearing and speech-impaired taxpayers. TIGTA found that the IRS exceeded its overall performance measurement goals by 2.3 percent. However, the Level of Service for the TTY/TDD toll-free telephone line for the 2010 Filing Season was just 8.8 percent, meaning that only 8.8 percent of calls placed using the TTY/TTD successfully reached an IRS assistor. The total dialed attempts for the TTY/TDD product line during the 2010 Filing Season were more than 350,000; however, IRS assistors answered only 339 of those calls.
“Our report found that far too few hearing and speech-impaired taxpayers successfully reached an IRS assistor,” said J. Russell George, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. “The IRS must do a better job of ensuring that all Americans have equal access to its services,” he said.
Actually, that is pretty shitty service. Even by IRS standards.
The IRS Could Improve Toll-Free Telephone Assistance For Hearing and Speech-Impaired Taxpayers [TIGTA]
