Given That Doing Business with Irs Is Mandatory for All Taxpayers, Why Should Irs Be Concerned with Customer Service?

1. Given that doing business with IRS is mandatory for all taxpayers, why should IRS be concerned with customer service?

Even paying tax is mandatory, IRS still needs to emphasis the customer service for a couple of reasons: (1) Good customer service will reduce the taxpayer’s burden therefore motivate the taxpayer to pay tax voluntarily. Taxation is always a complicated topic to most people. For example, filling your tax return may be the last thing you want to do, that is why the USPS opens until midnight on April 15. People need to pay a lot of tax service fee as well. With customer service (phone line and website), people can call in or search information online to solve the problems which they did not want to touch before. That makes tax return easier and save time and money for the taxpayer. With e-filling, taxpayer can get tax return 7-9 days, nobody will say no to a check if you are not required to do a very complicated thing, so the voluntary will be motivated by good customer service. (2) Good customer service can improve the productivity of IRS. Without help from IRS, people’s filling may has much more errors which will cost IRS tons of extra money and time on correcting and auditing the filling. So part of money from taxpayers will be wasted for the low efficiency, which taxpayer and government are not happy with. I will give credit to IT which improved IRS’s customer service, because it saves money and time for both taxpayer and IRS, increased the taxpayer’s satisfaction and increase the productivity of IRS significantly.

2. How would we know if IRS is performing better, that is, what are some specific measures of customer service quality or effectiveness?

We can use a couple of measures to evaluate IRS customer service quality: (1) Convenience measure, whether the taxpayer can reach IRS easily? Call-center, website and even walk-in help center should be available for different demands from tax payer. (2) Waiting time measure, how long the taxpayer needs to wait online, at the other side of the phone, or in the walk-in help center before they reach the services. (3) Satisfaction measure I, how well the taxpayers are treated? Do the taxpayers think they were respected? (4) Satisfaction measure II, are the taxpayers