The IRS is abandoning a customer service metric it’s been using for the past 20 years and replacing it with a new measurement that will more accurately reflect the public’s interactions with the tax agency, according to agency leadership.

The IRS is pursuing these changes as part of a broader shakeup of its senior ranks happening less than a week from the start of the tax filing season.

IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank Bisignano told employees in a memo obtained by Federal News Network that these changes will help the IRS achieve the “best filing season results in timeliness and accuracy.”

“At the heart of this vision is a digital-first taxpayer experience, complemented by a strong human touch wherever it is needed,” Bisignano wrote in the memo sent Tuesday.

In addition to overseeing day-to-day operations at the IRS, Bisignano also serves as the head of the Social Security Administration.

As part of these changes, Bisignano wrote that the IRS will place its current measurement of customer service over the phone with “enterprise metrics that reflect new technologies and service channels.”

“These updates will allow us to more accurately capture how the IRS serves taxpayers today,” he wrote.

The IRS and the Treasury Department did not respond to requests for comment. Bisignano told the Washington Post that the new metrics will track the agency’s average speed to answer incoming calls, call abandonment rates and the amount of time taxpayers spend on the line with the agency.

He told the Post that the agency’s old phone metrics didn’t help the IRS with its mission of solving taxpayers’ problems — and that the agency is investing in technology to better service its customers.

“We’re constantly investing in technology. We constantly must reap the rewards of it,” Bisignano told the Post.

The IRS is specifically sunsetting its Customer Service Representative Level of Service metric. The agency has used this metric for more than 20 years.

But the National Taxpayer Advocate, an independent watchdog within the IRS, told Congress last year that this metric is “misleading” and “does not accurately reflect the experience of most taxpayers who call” the agency.

National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins wrote in last year’s mid-year report to Congress that this Level of Service (LOS) metric only reflects calls coming into IRS accounts management phone lines, which make up only about 25% of the agency’s total call volume.

Using the LOS metric, the IRS achieved an 88% level of phone service in fiscal 2024. But IRS employees actually answered less than a third of calls received during the 2024 filing season — both in terms of total calls, and calls to accounts management phone lines.

The agency calculates its LOS metric by taking the percentage of phone calls answered by IRS employees and dividing it by the number of calls routed to IRS staff.

The IRS relies on this metric, as well as historical data on call volumes, to set targets for how many calls it has the capacity to answer, and to set hiring and training goals in preparation for each tax filing season.

Collins wrote that the LOS metric has become a proxy for the level of customer service taxpayers can expect from the IRS. But she told lawmakers that using this metric to drive taxpayer service decisions “is akin to letting the tail wag the dog.”

“The LOS is a check-the-box measure that fails to gauge the taxpayer’s telephone experience accurately and fails even to attempt to gauge the taxpayer experience in other important areas,” Collins wrote. “Yet because the IRS has adopted it as its primary measure of taxpayer service, sacrifices are made in other areas to boost the LOS as much as possible.”

Besides overhauling IRS call metrics, Bisignano announced a new leadership team at the agency.

As reported by the Associated Press, Gary Shapley, a whistleblower who testified about investigations into Hunter Biden’s taxes and who served as IRS commissioner for just two days last year, has been named deputy chief of the agency’s criminal investigation division.

According to Bisignano’s memo, Guy Ficco, the chief of the agency’s criminal investigation division, is retiring and will be replaced by Jarod Koopman, who will also continue to serve as the agency’s chief tax compliance officer.

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