
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, April 20, 1995                   TAG: 9504200092
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

IRS PHONE AID LAGS BEHIND PRIVATE SECTOR

Despite improved productivity, the Internal Revenue Service still lags far behind private companies in the quality of its telephone assistance, a congressional report says.

``IRS has fallen behind ... primarily because IRS' senior management has not aggressively and consistently pursued the implementation of commonly used practices,'' the General Accounting Office said.

From 1989 to last year, the number of callers receiving a busy signal or hanging up while on hold rose sharply while the proportion of calls answered fell from half to slightly less than one-quarter, said the GAO, Congress' investigative arm.

In the face of staff cuts, the IRS has managed through increased productivity to answer about the same number of calls each year - 36 million - through the five-year period. But the number of calls has skyrocketed from 73 million in 1989 to 156 million last year.

IRS officials in the past have said the surge in calls largely represents the use of automatic redial buttons by callers and not a substantial increase in taxpayers seeking information.

Responding to the GAO, IRS Assistant Commissioner Gwen Krauss said the report ``is not a balanced reflection of the service being delivered'' and ``dwells on current systems and procedures that we are already replacing.''

However, the GAO said the IRS' service does not even measure up to the telephone help offered by the Social Security Administration, let alone the standard set by the credit card, power, airline and insurance companies it checked.

For instance, the private companies required telephone assistors to be on the phone a certain amount of time, such as 7 hours and 40 minutes in an 81/2-hour shift. And three of the companies had standards for the number of calls to be answered, such as 80 to 100.

Some of the IRS' 27 call-answering centers had such standards but the standards aren't uniform across the country and often weren't enforced, the GAO said. At six IRS sites checked in a two-week period, the average time spent on the phone in an eight-hour day was 5 hours and 28 minutes. IRS personnel spent the rest of their time in such activities as researching answers to taxpayers' questions and attending training meetings, award ceremonies, blood drives and union meetings.

``If IRS had standards comparable to those commonly used by the organizations we contacted and required assistors to meet those standards, we believe they could answer substantially more calls,'' the GAO said.

by CNB