The IRS is looking to speed up training for new hires and temporarily reassigned employees using artificial intelligence.
The IRS spends about 14 weeks training new customer service representatives. But Taxpayer Services Chief Ken Corbin said last month at an industry conference that the agency’s training materials haven’t been updated to reflect the incoming workforce’s familiarity with digital tools.
“They learn differently. So having AI as an assistant to take some of those things out and simplify the code as it’s going along will shorten our training and make a better experience,” Corbin said on April 8 at a conference hosted by ACT-IAC and Dorris Consulting International.
Corbin told Federal News Network on the sidelines of the conference that plans to use AI to accelerate training are still a proof of concept and haven’t been implemented yet.
“We hope to see a more efficient, better-trained workforce in 2027 — one of those behind-the-curtain kinds of things that we think will work out really well,” Corbin said.
In February, the IRS reassigned about 1,500 IT and human resources employees on 120-day details to work in Taxpayer Services. The agency lost 27% of its employees last year, largely through voluntary separation incentives and early retirement offers. It also fell short of its hiring goals for the filing season.
Federal News Network reported last Friday that the IRS is extending most of the details for another 120 days. Many IRS employees on this detail have completed their monthslong training, but several classes remain in training.
“They’re on the floor now,” Corbin said about the temporarily reassigned IRS employees.
Corbin said the IRS has also rolled out a new workforce management tool that has reduced the amount of time employees spend waiting to assist taxpayers over the phone.
“We’re able to manage our workforce, especially between phones and other workstreams, a lot more efficiently this filing season. I talked about balance — balancing phones, balancing working paper. We’re integrating technology to help us be more efficient while still serving the customer, no matter which channel they come into,” Corbin said.
Ahead of this year’s filing season, the IRS lowered its level of service target for phone calls from 85% to 70%. The National Taxpayer Advocate said that the IRS “substantially overstaffed” its call centers in prior years when it set a higher metric, and that employees spent up to a third of their work hours “simply waiting for the phone to ring.”
IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank Bisignano told lawmakers last month that the IRS cut “idle time” in its call centers by nearly 50% during this year’s filing season. Bisignano and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said increased use of AI and automation tools allowed the IRS to carry out a successful filing season despite major staffing cuts.
In a keynote interview during the conference, Corbin said that Bisignano is bringing a “CEO mindset” to the agency and helping its leaders “ask the hard questions.”
“That CEO mindset is really helping us accelerate and think through, dive into some of the harder challenges that we face head on, but also really explore and celebrate those things that we are accomplishing and really talking more about what we do,” he said.
Corbin added that Bisignano is “an advocate for taxpayer customer experience and he really looks at how we are balancing the experience.”
Before the filing season started, Bisignano told employees in a memo that the IRS was scrapping a phone service metric it’s been using for 20 years and replacing it with a new measurement that will more accurately reflect the public’s interactions with the tax agency,
“We always say, what you measure matters. In our agency, contact representatives, they do web chats, they do phones, they do paper correspondence, they have like three or four different tasks or streams of work that they need to perform. And so if you only measure phones, then all those other work streams are suffering or are not getting the kind of attention that they need,” Corbin said. “What we’re focused more on is not just measuring one thing, but really measuring the full gamut of things that a position or service channels all at once — looking at online, looking at the in-person, looking at phones, looking at web chat. Really holistically looking across all of those different components.”
Corbin said the IRS customer service metrics should reflect other workstreams besides phone calls, and that the agency needs to balance its workforce across several public-facing tasks.
“If we get behind in processing returns or amended returns, it’s going to generate a phone call. So if you focus only on phones and don’t look at those other areas, you’re actually causing more traffic in one of your service channels.”
Even as the IRS ramps up its use of automation, Corbin said “there will always be a human in the loop” when it comes to contact centers
“Contact centers, for me, isn’t about waiting for the customer to contact you. It is about what connections do you build before they need to contact you? And then once you get into that layer of, ‘You have that relationship, and you built that connection,’ how do you integrate technology with humans?” he said.
Last week, the House passed a bill that would require the IRS to publicly post metrics on call volume, wait times and other key taxpayer services metrics.
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