The IRS did not just fall short of its phone-service target during the 2026 filing season; it lowered the target first. The agency cut its own goal for answering taxpayer calls from 85 percent during the 2025 season to 70 percent for 2026, then reported hitting about 73 percent, according to a June 2026 audit from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. The bar came down, and the agency still barely cleared it.
A New Measure Replaces the Old One
For 2026, the IRS renamed its central phone metric from Level of Service to the Assistor Service Rate, a change the agency says reflects one added feature: the new rate counts questions answered through Live Chat alongside calls answered by phone. IRS leadership told auditors that, because Live Chat remains limited to a narrow set of questions about amended returns and transcripts for international taxpayers, the new measure and the old one are comparable for the time being.
Comparable or not, the number attached to the new measure came with a lower bar built in. Accounts Management leadership told the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration that it reduced the goal to 70 percent specifically to account for staffing shortfalls documented elsewhere in the same audit, rather than adding staff to try to hold the old 85 percent target.
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Fewer Calls Answered, Even With a Lower Bar
The number of calls IRS assistors actually answered fell from 4.5 million during the 2025 season to 3.2 million in 2026, even though the agency had projected receiving about 13.8 million calls for the year and, in practice, took in 1.3 million fewer calls than the year before. A smaller pool of assistors handled a smaller pool of calls, and the new 70 percent goal was set with that math already built in rather than as a response to rising demand.
The IRS’s own 73 percent Assistor Service Rate describes only the calls that reached an assistor queue in the first place. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration built a separate, stricter measure of its own, called the Level of Access, which counts every dialed attempt, including calls that never reached anyone. That harsher yardstick came out to 44 percent for the 2026 season, up from 30 percent the year before but still describing a system in which most attempts to reach the IRS by phone during the 2025 season went unanswered.
Accounts Management also told auditors it plans to increase overtime usage through the rest of the fiscal year to offset the hiring shortfall, on top of the temporary reassignment of employees from other IRS offices used earlier in the season. Both moves treat the lower goal as a bridge rather than a permanent target, tied to how quickly the agency can fill the positions it was already approved to hire.
A Lower Target Still Reaches a Retiree’s Notice
For a retiree trying to resolve a Social Security-linked tax question, sort out a stalled-refund notice, or ask why a payment did not post, the service-rate goal is not an abstraction; it is the rough odds that a phone call gets answered by a person rather than dropped, redirected to a callback, or abandoned after a long hold. A goal of 70 percent, hit at 73 percent, still leaves roughly one in four attempts without that outcome, and TIGTA’s own tougher measure puts the real odds closer to one in two.
The IRS has flagged its own fix for the gap: an artificial-intelligence tool called Taxpayer 360, meant to help Accounts Management representatives research answers faster once fully deployed. Only about 9,000 employees had access to the first release as of early March 2026, and using it is not mandatory, so the tool has not yet shown up in the season’s service numbers. Taxpayers can check current contact options, including the IRS Individual Online Account, without waiting for that rollout to finish.
Taxpayers who cannot get through by phone are not without other options while the lower goal stands. The IRS’s Let Us Help You page lists current self-service tools and alternative contact channels, and the same audit found that Taxpayer Assistance Centers, though thinly staffed in many locations, remain available by appointment for account issues a phone call alone cannot resolve.
Whether the Assistor Service Rate goal returns to 85 percent for the 2027 filing season depends largely on whether the IRS closes the hiring gaps documented in the same audit. Until then, the lower target is the standard the agency has set for itself, and taxpayers calling with a tax question are the ones absorbing the difference in practice.
What a stalled refund actually means
Each status message and each notice points to a different cause, and each cause has its own next step.
The IRS Refund Recovery Kit includes a 13-page kit, a notice decoder and the refund-trace steps (Form 3911).
Read the notice decoder in The IRS Refund Recovery Kit.
This article was researched and drafted with AI assistance and reviewed against primary sources before publication.
