Improving Federal Customer Service Efforts

Over the past 20 years, federal agencies have been working to improve customer service. For instance, the GPRA Modernization Act of 2010 (GPRAMA) required that agency performance plans measure progress toward customer service goals, including quality, timeliness, and satisfaction. Moreover, in March 2018, the Office of Management and Budget announced a cross-agency priority goal to improve customer experiences with federal services. 

However, many federal agencies are still not meeting customer needs or making improvements to address customer concerns.

For example:

• During the 2020 filing season, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) faced numerous challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. IRS closed all processing facilities for several weeks during spring 2020 for health and safety reasons. As a result, IRS’s overall 2020 performance was significantly affected due partly to its reliance on manual processes (such as opening mail and processing paper returns). As of December 2020, IRS had a significant backlog of unprocessed returns and taxpayer correspondence, which it needed to address while also processing incoming returns for the 2021 filing season. This increased IRS’s costs, mainly due to interest paid on delayed refunds (which exceeded $3 billion in FY 2020).
  
  
• While most individual taxpayers file returns electronically, this generally isn’t the case for businesses. In 2020, about 23% of businesses filed a total of 11.5 million returns on paper—even though an e-file option was available. Fully assessing why businesses continue to file on paper when they could e-file will help IRS identify and address barriers businesses face to e-filing.

Interest Paid on Individual and Business Refunds (in Millions), FYs 2015-2020

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• The Social Security Administration’s (SSA) workload has grown with the aging of the baby boomer population; at the same time, many of its most experienced staff are expected to retire. The agency estimates that retirement and disability beneficiaries will increase by 15% between 2017 and 2025, while a third of its employees will retire by 2022. Despite SSA's efforts to manage its rising workload, customer service in field offices and on its telephone hotline has suffered. While the agency has yet to create a long-term plan to address this issue, it has increased the proportion of its services that are delivered electronically to help with the demand for customer service.
  

Long-Term Projected Growth in SSA's Workload Coincides with Large Numbers of Potential Employee Retirements

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