Tax Administration: More Improvement Needed in IRS Correspondence (Letter Report, 06/01/94, GAO/GGD-94-118). During the past 6 years, GAO, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and others have cited delayed, inaccurate, incomplete, and confusing responses to taxpayer letters as chronic IRS problems. Although IRS has made progress in correcting its correspondence problems by adopting quality and timeliness standards and by expanding quality reviews of outgoing mail, some problems persist. A GAO review of nearly 1,900 closed correspondence cases in IRS' Atlanta and Cincinnati service centers found that 15 percent of the cases were incorrect, unclear, incomplete, or nonresponsive. Also, 11 percent of the cases resulted from taxpayers repeatedly trying to contact IRS to resolve a matter. Problems such as these increase IRS' costs, frustrate taxpayers, and ultimately discourage taxpayer compliance with the tax laws. GAO outlines several opportunities for IRS to improve its responsiveness to taxpayers, including resolving more taxpayer issues by telephone, clarifying the situations that warrant an IRS response to taxpayer correspondence, making timeliness indicators more useful, and improving interim letters. --------------------------- Indexing Terms ----------------------------- REPORTNUM: GGD-94-118 TITLE: Tax Administration: More Improvement Needed in IRS Correspondence DATE: 06/01/94 SUBJECT: Tax administration systems Computerized information systems Information processing operations Internal controls Taxpayers Quality control Tax returns Human resources utilization Communications (messages) IDENTIFIER: IRS Automated Inventory Control System IRS Professional Letter System IRS Correspondex Expert System IRS Integrated Case Processing System IRS Tax System Modernization Program National Performance Review TSM ************************************************************************ We regret that the full text of this item is presently unavailable. See the GAO FAQ - Section 2.0 for printed copy ordering information. The FAQ is automatically retrieved with all WAIS search results or can be obtained by sending e-mail to: [email protected]