Improving user experience ‘a constant journey’ at IRS

More free phone lines, more self-assistance, and increased access for tax professionals are just a few of the goals the Internal Revenue Service is setting for itself over the next several years.

Speaking during a service design panel at the July IRS Industry Day held in New Carrollton, Maryland, IRS Director of Online Services Paul Mamo said his team’s goal is to reshape the taxpayer experience.

“We’re trying to build a model that thinks about the taxpayers’ perspective out of the gate,” Mamo said. “We’re not building in the back of the room, thinking somehow that we have it all figured out. We’re really doing this in a very iterative fashion. You’re going to hear words like ‘agile,’ ‘iterative,’ that’s really sort of where we’re going with this.”

Similar to someone’s favorite website or mobile app, IRS is aiming for an experience where people want to return because it’s a service that’s enjoyable to use. Mamo said this means staying away from walls of overwhelming texts, and making it easy for users to get in, get out and move on.

“That’s the kind of experience everyone has come to expect,” Mamo said. “That’s the sort of experience that we want to be able to offer up.”

Mamo said in light of reduced resources, it’s more affordable to work virtually with taxpayers as opposed to in-person or through the mail, but some customers still need direct communication with a human. One way IRS is addressing both of these needs is through its online account tool, which launched in November. The tool allows users to view their IRS account balance, including taxes owed as well as penalties and interest.

The online account tool allows taxpayers to have another way of corresponding with the IRS, said Kevin Morehead, director of accounts management at IRS.

Telephone service is at its highest level in a decade, Morehead said, in part to the online account option.

“We offer a lot of service through the telephone channel. One of the problems we’ve had is trying to get people that we need to talk to, that really need to correspond with us, to get the access,” Morehead said, adding that many times someone calls the IRS simply to check their balance. “We’d rather resolve an account issue, or work with somebody that we may have to talk to. So as you begin to get more customers that can go to an online account environment and help self-assist, then we can talk to the other customers that are necessary for us to actually have some interactions with.”

Morehead said the accounts management team is also excited about the IRS’ payment tracking ability on its direct pay online tool, because a lot of customers also call to ensure the agency received their payment.

“We’re trying to represent the customer, because we know what they call us about, know what they write us about, know what they walk in [for],” Morehead said.

Morehead said part of adding new channels and tools for customers is about getting leadership and IT into the same room during development.

Mamo said collaboration is one thing IRS is working on, and another is shifting customer behavior through trust. Mamo said in his experience, when a new channel is opened, usually customers fill up that new channel with the same demands.

“We’re making incremental steps,” Mamo said. “When people get out there and have an online account, and they see their information … that gives them a good feeling. The reason the experience from the user interface is so important … is that right now if you go to IRS.gov, we have a lot of applications, a lot of interactive sessions. It may look very different from one session to the next.”

A user might worry they’ve been taken somewhere they shouldn’t be, Mamo said, and become uneasy about the process.

“We’re trying to reshape those experiences,” Mamo said. “We’ve done a lot of simplifying plain language, more visualization so folks know exactly what’s being offered up.”

Mamo said one of the latest additions to the online account is a sort of tax record snapshot. If a user needs their Adjusted Gross Income (AGI), for example, or needs to remember how many dependents they claimed, they won’t have to download their full transcript.

“That’s going to … hopefully release some of the demand on the phone,  that’s why that experience is so important, that we get it right, and that we continue to refine it,” Mamo said. “It’s a constant journey … to kind of figure out and make sure the experience is always evolving based on feedback.”

Doing right

One other area where IRS is looking to evolve is what it can do for tax professionals.

Morehead said there is still a desire for tax practitioners to be able to see their clients’ information.

“They would like to be able to see it themselves, so I think some of the future is we figure out how to do that, how we work through authentication and authorizations,” Morehead said. “Security and identity theft are some of the barriers we’ve had to overcome in this process, to really make sure we are providing all this cool data to the person that the data is about. and not just some fraudster. At the same time, as you begin to authorize someone else to see your cool data, that is another potential barrier we have to make sure that we do right.”

IRS Web Applications Program Management Office Director Mona Henby is helping IRS address IT security, and she said what the agency is focusing on is ensuring that “people are who they say they are.”

“So we have an IT program that we put out there that all the applications are going to get behind. Online account is one of them,” Henby said. “Then we’re continuing in the IT space to look at ways where we can deliver other capabilities. Online account … was our priority, but guess what? Once you deliver something good, everybody comes. We have a lot of requests to deliver other capabilities.” 

Henby said a goal is to not only match industry’s nine-week cadence for product delivery,  but get to a six-week turnaround. She said that because IRS is short on staff, she expects that the agency will rely more on industry in the future.

“As we are approached to accelerate, we need strategic partners in the industry. As we start continuing to get those multi-delivery components, we will be leveraging externals,” Henby said. “So we do have some vehicles in place to bring in some competition around delivering some of these capabilities, when we start looking for other opportunities we’ll certainly be leveraging the industry.”

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