IRS Wants to Improve Payroll Customer Engagement

Payroll professionals are a “crucial, crucial part of tax administration,” an IRS official said May 13.

“In the past, we were doing a lot less with payroll groups than with CPA societies, enrolled agents, and attorneys,” said Maggie Romaniello, manager of the IRS’s Issues Management Resolutions Systems. “We’re trying to turn that around and have more active and engaged relationships with payroll organizations—not just PayrollOrg but also the local chapters.”

Romaniello spoke at PayrollOrg’s 44th Payroll Congress, in Nashville, Tennessee.

That increased engagement may be more noticeable in the IRS’s National Tax Forums, three-day courses being held in cities around the country from early July to mid-September. “I’m hoping that there’s a noticeable difference between past years and this year,” Romaniello said. “IRS is taking a closer look at the content being presented to make it more useful, and we’re transitioning toward more payroll-focused topics.”

Bad Customer Service? IRS Wants to Know

“We’re just past the end of filing season, and I’m guessing that many of you have tried to engage with us since January, and you either don’t get through, get what we call a ‘courtesy disconnect,’ or you get somebody on the phone and get placed on hold only to be disconnected.”

The “courtesy disconnects,” which occur when callers are unable to connect for an extended period, are a limitation of IRS’s phone system, Romaniello said. There’s a different problem, she said, when a caller gets through and gets put on hold while the agent researches the issue underlying the call. “If you then get disconnected, we want to know about that,” Romaniello said.

To trace a specific call, the IRS would need to know the date and time of the call, the IRS number called, and the number the taxpayer called from. “I don’t want you to think that our employees are hanging up on you,” Romaniello said. “Despite the fact that it might feel like that, we’re pretty confident it’s not that.”

For skeptics, Romaniello said, “When you call, it is a mandate that employees give you their name and badge number. I know, sometimes they say it so fast. Please ask them to repeat it, and write it down,” she said.

“It you have a complaint, or a compliment, you can contact your local stakeholder liaison. These are IRS employees that work with the practitioner community to help you navigate the IRS and to raise issues that are obstacles to tax administration.” The IRS website lists stakeholder liaison contacts with states divided into five regions. The contacts include phone numbers and email addresses, and the messages “get checked every day,” Romaniello said. “If you don’t hear from somebody, you can contact your local organization and they can raise it with us,” Romaniello said, referring to PayrollOrg or a local payroll chapter. “We take that very seriously,” she said.

Since January 2025, the IRS lost about 25% of its workforce, with some areas suffering higher attrition rates than others. “With the number of people retiring, we lost a lot of institutional knowledge,” Romaniello said. The IRS’s telephone assistance suffered attrition along with the rest of the agency. To ramp up for filing season, IRS transferred employees from nontechnical departments to field customer calls. “I’m not here to make excuses for us. I’m just trying to explain why you might not be getting the best service,” Romaniello said.