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What NTUF’s mid-year assessment says
In its October 6, 2026 update, NTUF says the available results make it difficult to tell whether taxpayer service improved, declined, or stayed the same. Its earlier 2025–2026 update raised the IRS taxpayer-services grade from C to B-, conditional on improvement during the 2026 filing season. The October update does not assign a new final letter grade.
NTUF’s criticism is that the IRS changed the service measure and set a lower target. That is NTUF’s assessment, not a neutral audit finding. The key issue is that the 2026 Assistor Service Rate (ASR) and the prior-year Level of Service (LOS) do not have identical definitions or coverage.
Why the 73% service rate is not directly comparable to 87%
NTUF reports a 2026 ASR goal of 70% and actual result of 73%. For the prior year, it lists an LOS goal of 85% and actual result of 87%. Because the measures differ, the higher 2025 figure does not establish that service was better then, and the 2026 result does not establish that service improved.
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| Measure | What it counts | Reported result |
|---|---|---|
| Level of Service (LOS) | NTUF describes the historical measure as calls routed to IRS employees and ultimately answered on Accounts Management lines. The IRS says LOS excludes other lines, automated-response calls, and callers who hang up before joining a queue. | For 2025, NTUF lists an 85% goal and an 87% actual. |
| Assistor Service Rate (ASR) | NTUF describes it as completed telephone or live-chat contacts divided by contacts received. NTUF says the IRS’s 2026 goal was 70% and actual was 73%; it also reports that TIGTA considered ASR similar to LOS, with live chat included. | For 2026, NTUF lists a 70% goal and a 73% actual. |
| Level of Access | NTUF identifies this as TIGTA’s measure of calls seeking help across all phone lines that ultimately receive assistance. | NTUF reports TIGTA figures of 30% for 2025 and 44% for 2026. |
| Enterprise Service Completion Rate (ESCR) | NTUF describes this broader measure as completed services by phone, live chat, and bots divided by contacts received. | NTUF’s table lists no 2026 goal or actual. |
The difference in scope matters. NTUF says ASR still omits much of the IRS’s inventory of more than 100 phone lines, while TIGTA’s Level of Access measure looks across all lines. A line-specific rate can therefore look stronger than the chance that a caller seeking assistance anywhere in the system gets help.
None of these percentages, by itself, tells a taxpayer whether an issue was accurately resolved. A completed contact is not necessarily the same as a completed case, and a broader measure such as ESCR would include automated contacts but has no 2026 result in NTUF’s table.
What callers experienced during filing season
The IRS’s June 24, 2026 summary of National Taxpayer Advocate Erin M. Collins’s report gives a different view of live telephone assistance. In filing season 2026, assistors answered 9.9 million of 48.1 million calls, or 21%, and the average hold was 14 minutes. In filing season 2025, assistors answered 12.4 million of 50.2 million calls, or 25%, with an eight-minute average hold.
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Those figures cover calls to telephone assistors, not every way a taxpayer may interact with the IRS. Still, they show why a goal-based rate should not be read as a complete account of caller access: the count of answered calls and the average wait moved in the wrong direction year over year in this IRS-published summary.
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Some lines were harder to reach than the overall figures suggest
The IRS summary reports particularly low answer rates on lines serving people with specific, often urgent needs. During filing season 2026:
- The Installment Agreement/Balance Due line received about 3.4 million calls, answered 31%, and had a 45-minute average hold.
- The Taxpayer Protection Program line received about 2.4 million calls, answered 19%, and had a 20-minute average hold.
Averages across Accounts Management or the full phone system can obscure this unevenness. Someone seeking a payment arrangement or trying to resolve an identity-verification problem may have a very different experience from a caller whose question is handled through a general line or automated channel.
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Most returns were processed, but service problems persisted
The filing season was not an across-the-board processing failure. By April 18, 2026, the IRS had received 140.2 million individual returns and processed 138.6 million, according to the Taxpayer Advocate Service’s June 2026 objectives report. The IRS summary of the Advocate’s report says more than 90 million refunds were issued; the detailed figures give 90.4 million refunds totaling about $296.1 billion, with an average refund of $3,275.
At the same time, the Advocate’s 2026 filing-season report says more than 14 million individual returns were suspended during processing. More than one million taxpayers missed the normal refund-processing time and waited an average of about five and a half weeks. The report also says identity-theft victims in many cases faced delays close to two years. These are findings tied to the 2026 filing season, not a claim that all returns or refunds experienced those delays.
Collins emphasized that taxpayers who fall outside standard processing channels may be especially likely to need assistance, including people who are elderly, disabled, limited-English proficient, unbanked, or without reliable internet access. When a return is flagged, a refund is delayed, or a taxpayer cannot use an automated channel, the quality and availability of individualized help become central to the service experience.
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What oversight says about measuring taxpayer experience
The rates above track different stages and kinds of service: a call answered, a contact completed, or a service delivered through a mix of human and automated channels. They do not automatically show whether the taxpayer obtained accurate, understandable, and timely help.
In a July 17, 2025 report, the Government Accountability Office said the IRS had more than 150 service-improvement projects as of February 2025 but had not fully established an evidence-based approach for assessing how those projects affected taxpayer experience. GAO recommended that the IRS establish such an approach. That is historical oversight context; it is not a finding about every project underway in 2026.
For taxpayers, meaningful evaluation should distinguish whether someone reached a channel from whether their problem was resolved. It should also show results for people whose needs are not met by automation, and report wait times and abandonment alongside service rates. As Collins put it, a “digital-first strategy can improve tax administration but must not become a digital-only strategy.”
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How to read claims that IRS service improved
When a headline cites a service percentage, check what it measures before treating it as a verdict on the whole filing season:
- Identify the denominator. Does the rate include all incoming calls, only callers who joined a queue, or completed contacts across multiple channels?
- Check the coverage. Is it limited to Accounts Management or does it include the IRS’s other phone lines?
- Separate goals from outcomes. Meeting a target is not the same as demonstrating year-over-year improvement, especially when the measure has changed.
- Look beyond answer rates. Waits, unanswered calls, suspended returns, delayed refunds, and case resolution affect the taxpayer’s actual experience.
- Ask who is left out. Automated services can help many people, but taxpayers with complex cases or access barriers may still need a person.
On the available 2026 figures, the balanced conclusion is that return processing was broadly successful, while live assistance and some high-need service lines remained significant weak points. The ASR result alone cannot settle whether IRS service improved overall.
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