Project 01199

There are numerous ways in which a taxpayer or tax professional can communicate with the IRS to get answers to questions or resolve issues, including phone, chat bot, live chat, secure messaging, and in-person appointments. However, those communication channels don’t exist as a unified, holistic communication system, but rather as independent, unintegrated channels, with inconsistent availability from one topic area to the next (e.g., secure messaging use is inconsistent between business units; chat is available from some pages in IRS.gov but not others; etc.). We are planning an overhaul of our communication system to make it user- and issue-centered, creating a better experience for users. To do that, we need to collect feedback from taxpayers and tax professionals about their experiences contacting the IRS: What’s working well? What isn’t? How could we better serve users’ communication needs?

An ideal outcome would be answers to the following questions: • Other than phone wait times, what are the biggest pain points for taxpayers and tax professionals trying to communicate with the IRS? What problems are most important for the IRS to tackle? • Focusing on digital communication: What are specific examples of challenges of using the IRS’s current chat bot, live chat, and secure messaging systems? How do our communication channels compare with those of other businesses or organizations? What could the IRS be doing better? • Why might users elect not to use the IRS’s digital communication channels (e.g., privacy: What are users concerned about?)? • What communication with the IRS do taxpayers and tax professionals wish they could do digitally that they currently cannot? Why? • What communication with the IRS do taxpayers and tax professionals wish they could do digitally that they currently cannot? Why?What communication with the IRS do taxpayers and tax professionals wish they could do digitally that they currently cannot? Why?