House votes to make IRS publish call metrics online

The House on Monday passed a set of bipartisan proposals meant to improve IRS customer service and technology.

The Taxpayer Experience Improvement Act, backed by Reps. David Schweikert, R-Ariz., and Don Beyer, D-Va., requires the tax agency to publish detailed, real-time and monthly metrics online like call volume, wait times and callback availability for major IRS phone lines. 

The proposal also instructs the IRS to make more information on refund status available to taxpayers through online IRS accounts, where the agency would be required to allow taxpayers to respond to IRS letters online. 

Similar legislation has been introduced in previous sessions of Congress but not made it into law. The Senate has yet to pass the bill, which Sens. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., introduced in February.

The IRS replaced its telephone customer service metric earlier this year. The National Taxpayer Advocate had called that old metric misleading because it measures the percentage of calls answered by a person among those sent to IRS employees, not the proportion of callers who reach a person. In fiscal 2025, the level of service was 60%, but only 26% of callers spoke with an IRS employee, according to the internal watchdog.

The IRS will now track average speed of answer, call abandonment rate and time spent on the phone line, IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank Bisignano told The Washington Post earlier this year. 

Before replacing the metric altogether, the agency lowered its level of service standard from 85% of calls answered to 70%. Last year, the IRS pushed thousands of employees out of their jobs, mostly through voluntary incentives. It then struggled to hire employees for tax filing season and eventually moved human resources and tech employees to fill in taxpayer service roles.

Bisignano is also the head of the Social Security Administration, another federal entity with metrics that have been in the news since many of them were removed from the agency's website last year. SSA’s inspector general released a report on the agency’s phone line metrics late last year that showed SSA’s new wait time metric is lower than the amount of time it actually takes for callers to speak with an SSA employee.

Lawmakers in the House also passed the BARCODE Efficiency Act on Monday. Like the Taxpayer Experience Improvement Act, it’s also been introduced in a prior Congress but didn’t become law. 

The bill, which has yet to move through the Senate, would require the IRS to use barcodes and scanning technology to digitize paper federal tax returns and convert the data into an electronic format. The tax agency would also be tasked with using optical character recognition technology to transcribe paper returns and paper correspondence received by the IRS.

Reps. Brad Schnieder, D-Ill., and Rudy Yakym, R-Ind., introduced the House version, and Sens. Todd Young, R-Ind., and Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., are backing it in the Senate.

The IRS has been trying to rid itself of paper for years, and the National Taxpayer Advocate has long recommended that the IRS use barcode and OCR technology.