IRS aims to eliminate 'line-cutting' on Practitioner Priority Service

The Internal Revenue Service hopes to curb the use of robocalling services as a way to cut to the front of the line at the Practitioner Priority Service.

The IRS said in an email Friday to tax professionals that it has initiated a pilot program that now requires PPS callers to repeat certain phrases before they're transferred to an IRS phone assistor. The pilot program uses speech recognition technology to help ensure a live person is calling and not a mechanical device. "The new process is intended to improve customer service by reducing unnecessary wait times," said the IRS.

The move aims to block third-party companies from using autodialers and robocalling technology to help tax pros reach the IRS, which has been more of a challenge in recent years, even though the PPS line is supposed to help them reach the agency more easily than regular taxpayers. One such company, enQ, posted a message Friday on its website that it is now suspending the service, according to Ed Zollars,  a partner at Thomas, Zollars & Lynch CPAs, on his Current Federal Tax Developments blog for Kaplan Financial Education.

"EnQ is temporarily suspending services to: Practitioner Priority Service Business, Correspondence Examination Individual/Business, and Automated Underreporter due to changes on the IRS call center," said the company. "Please direct your calls to other departments while we work on a solution."

The IRS headquarters in Washington
The IRS headquarters in Washington.
Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

The move was telegraphed last Monday by Timothy McCormally, a special counsel with the IRS Office of Professional Responsibility, who told a meeting of the American Bar Association's Section of Taxation that the IRS would be enhancing its PPS hotline to deal with robocalls and autodialer programs, according to Tax Notes Today, as a way to curb "line-cutting through technology."

The National Taxpayer Advocate's annual report to Congress found that the percentage of calls answered on the PPS line declined from 78.3% in fiscal year 2019 to 28.0% in FY 2021, with the average time to answer a call nearly doubling from 8.8 minutes to 16.1 minutes over that same period. Still, that was better than the level of service for regular taxpayers, where the percentage of calls answered by IRS employees declined from 28.7% in FY 2019 to 11.4% in FY 2021 and the average speed of answer went from 16.2 minutes in FY 2019 to 22.8 minutes in FY 2021. Many taxpayers have complained they were unable to get through at all. 

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