Vindictive officials, inaccurate answers and archaic practices were just a few of the reasons Congress scolded the Internal Revenue Service a couple of years ago at widely reported hearings. Out of those hearings came the Internal Revenue Service Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, with a set of goals that would measure the agency’s level of improvement. A recent report from the General Accounting Office concludes the nation’s tax collector may need to file for an extension to meet the goals.

The GAO study looked at the ability of the IRS to answer the telephone and provide accurate information to tax questions during the 2000 tax season. It found that the IRS answered 59 percent of calls to its toll-free lines, which was better than the 50 percent rate in 1999 but worse than the ’98 rate of 69 percent. The comparison seems almost too trite to mention, but imagine a business missing 41 percent of its calls from customers.

On accuracy, a tax filer was only slightly better off calling the IRS than, say, asking his second cousin who is married to an accountant. IRS telephone staff – they’re called assistors – estimated they got tax law questions right about 73 percent of the time; they were accurate with account questions 59 percent of the time, both missing IRS targets for the year.

The IRS is trying to do better, and credit is due to any government agency, whether under congressional scrutiny or not, that makes changes in order to improve service. But the inability of an agency to respond to a high number of calls and the significant likelihood that a caller with a tax or account question is going to get the wrong answer is damaging to the nation’s tax system. It jeopardizes the primary funding source for essential programs like the military or Medicaid or education and leads taxpayers to see the government as an enemy.

Members of Congress three years ago were in apparent agony over the misadventures of the IRS. The situation seems less dire now but it still isn’t good. Based on the GAO study, assistors seem to be taking fewer but more complicated calls about taxes. Congress might help the situation by seeing that the IRS has enough staff at the telephone and then directing funds to improving the skills of the assistors. That should move the telephone calls along and provide more accurate answers to callers.