Nearly half of the IRS’s face-to-face help nationwide is running on a skeleton crew. As of mid-February 2026, 169 of the agency’s 353 Taxpayer Assistance Centers were staffed by only one or two employees, according to a June 2026 audit from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, thinning exactly the kind of in-person help that older taxpayers often rely on when a phone call or a website cannot resolve an issue.
What a Thin Staff Means at the Counter
A Taxpayer Assistance Center handles tasks that are difficult to manage any other way: verifying the identity of someone flagged as a possible identity-theft victim, accepting cash payments, and working through account-specific questions that require a file and an employee in front of a taxpayer. With only one or two people covering an office, the range of appointments a center can offer on a given day shrinks, and any illness, vacation, or staff departure can effectively shut the location down for that stretch.
Getting an appointment already requires clearing a hurdle before walking through the door. The same audit found that the IRS generally requires taxpayers to call an appointment line first, so staff can try to resolve the issue over the phone and avoid the visit altogether; that call volume fell from 359,767 in fiscal 2025 to 238,736 in fiscal 2026, even as the underlying staffing pressure on the centers continued.
Anyone who does get an appointment is generally asked to bring current government-issued photo identification and, if the visit concerns a specific tax year, a copy of that year’s return, under the IRS’s standard guidance for center visitors. A retiree relying on a two-person office cannot count on walking in without those documents and still being seen the same day.
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The Backup Channels the IRS Is Building
To offset thin staffing at physical counters, the IRS expanded a handful of alternatives. Saturday hours grew from 42 Taxpayer Assistance Centers open on one weekend in February 2025 to 61 centers open on the comparable Saturday in 2026, giving retirees and caregivers who cannot make a weekday appointment another option. A newer Web Service Delivery initiative lets a taxpayer schedule a video appointment with an IRS employee instead of driving to an office.
The IRS also runs a Virtual Service Delivery option for areas with no Taxpayer Assistance Center nearby, using video and audio to connect a taxpayer with an assistor working from a different location, along with a small number of offices co-located with Social Security Administration field offices. None of these alternatives replace an in-person visit for every situation; identity verification after suspected fraud, for one, often still requires showing a physical document. The Contact Your Local Office tool lists which of these options is available at a given center before a taxpayer commits to a trip.
Fewer People Walked Through the Door Anyway
Total foot traffic across every Taxpayer Assistance Center channel fell from 930,292 taxpayers served in fiscal 2025 to 684,099 in fiscal 2026, a drop of about 26 percent. IRS management attributed part of the decline to outside disruptions, including severe weather and a government shutdown, and part to taxpayers increasingly resolving issues online rather than in person.
That shift toward self-service is real: the number of taxpayers with an IRS Individual Online Account grew 25 percent over the same period, according to the same report, reaching 64.4 million. But a drop in visits does not necessarily mean the need for in-person help disappeared; it can also reflect someone who needed a center appointment, found a two-person office with no openings for weeks, and either did without the help or absorbed the same delay some other way.
The Volunteer Income Tax Assistance and Tax Counseling for the Elderly programs, which offer no-cost tax preparation aimed partly at low-income and older taxpayers, prepared 925,000 returns across 8,114 sites in fiscal 2026, down only slightly from 1.0 million returns across 8,401 sites the year before. Neither program performs the identity verification or account adjustments a formal Taxpayer Assistance Center appointment handles, so they remain a partial substitute at best for the thinnest-staffed centers.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said it plans a dedicated follow-up review specifically focused on the actions IRS takes at Taxpayer Assistance Centers, separate from this broader filing-season audit. That signals the thin staffing counted this season is likely to get closer scrutiny before the office issues its final assessment of the 2026 filing season later in the year.
Inside the kit
A notice decoder, the refund-trace steps for Form 3911, a refund status tracker spreadsheet and the 3-year refund deadline.
The IRS Refund Recovery Kit includes a 13-page kit, a notice decoder and the refund-trace steps (Form 3911).
Open The IRS Refund Recovery Kit.
This article was researched and drafted with AI assistance and reviewed against primary sources before publication.
