IRS Phone Number: 2027 Tax Season Staffing Strain

IRS officials told the AICPA National Tax Conference in Washington on November 10 that staff cuts of 25% to 30% will make the 2027 filing season hard, with the IRS phone number the likeliest bottleneck.

For accounting firms, the message is to plan for the IRS to be slow to reach. Firms that rely on phone calls to resolve notices, payment plans and account problems will need other routes.

“We’re looking at another challenging filing season ahead.”
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Chris Pleffner, Director of the Tax Professional Management Office, IRS

Pleffner said the agency is well into preparations for 2027. He said the IRS still has work to do on provisions covering tips, overtime and car loan interest, and that it issued additional guidance on the overtime deduction in August.

The staffing figure was cited at the session by National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins, who put the reduction at approximately 25% to 30% over the past year. The session produced no new service targets for 2027.

The IRS phone number after a 25% staffing cut

The last filing season shows what a smaller workforce does to the phones. The National Taxpayer Advocate reported in June that assistors answered 21% of 48.1 million calls through April 18, 2026, with an average hold of 14 minutes.

A year earlier assistors answered 25% of 50.2 million calls and the average hold was eight minutes. The Advocate’s report, released June 24, said taxpayers who needed help “often struggled to get it.”

The picture varied by line. The IRS provided a 73% level of service on its Accounts Management lines, with an average wait of eight minutes. The Installment Agreement and Balance Due line was answered 31% of the time, with a 45-minute wait, and the Taxpayer Protection Program line 19% of the time, with a 20-minute wait.

A firm’s experience of the IRS phone number therefore depends on which line it needs. Payment plan and identity-protection calls are where the delays were longest.

Why the IRS phone number dips after April 15

Collins, speaking with AICPA chair Jan Lewis, said staff are stretched across tasks. “They’re account managers, so they’re not just answering the phones,” she said. “They do everything.”

She said the IRS runs on old systems and its staff cannot multitask. They are either on the phones or assigned to paper. During filing season the agency puts more people on the phones, and that was at least better than in earlier years.

“They pull all those folks off to work the paper, and so all of a sudden you will see the phone lines dipping.”

Erin Collins, National Taxpayer Advocate

Collins said the drop comes after April 15, citing “a random Friday in July” as an example. The number of callers does not fall away at that point, but the number of assistors does.

Edward Killen, commissioner of the Tax-Exempt and Government Entities division, said the answer is less paper. He described the Zero Paper Initiative as a critical part of the agency’s transformation, aimed at converting remittances and correspondence to digital records and reducing manual data entry.

The programme has run into trouble. A July memorandum from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found security gaps at contractor sites handling taxpayer documents. The IRS said it has taken or will take corrective action, and the inspector general said it will visit other facilities as scanning begins. The memorandum is published on the inspector general’s site.

A Government Accountability Office report released on November 10 found the IRS still struggles to measure the benefits of its customer service investments.

What the IRS wants tax professionals to do

Pleffner asked CPAs to push clients with children under 18 to use the official Trump Accounts app and claim the account. A parent or guardian must claim it before the account can receive contributions from family, friends and employers.

The IRS recently created a Tax Professional Management Office, which oversees the Return Preparer Office and the Office of Professional Responsibility. Pleffner said the authorities of the Office of Professional Responsibility under Circular 230 are unchanged. He said the reorganisation supports the workforce directive in Executive Order 14210 and streamlines small branches.

The agency also said it is improving online services for individuals, businesses and tax professionals. Collins urged practitioners to use Tax Pro Accounts to deal with the IRS rather than the phone.

She predicted that Form 2848 power of attorney submissions will come to the accounts first, followed by access to client information. “I don’t see it happening in the next few months, but I’m hopeful it’s going to happen in ’27,” she said.

That timing matters. A firm cannot plan its January workflow around a feature that has no release date. Firms should build their engagement and consent paperwork on the assumption that representation work still runs on paper and phone.

Enforcement continues despite the IRS staffing cuts

Lia Colbert, commissioner of the Small Business/Self-Employed Division, said the IRS remains committed to “a strong, viable enforcement arm.” She said taxpayers will see investment across a range from soft notices and education to full compliance, collection and audits.

Colbert said the agency is increasingly using artificial intelligence, which President Trump calls “super intelligence,” to select higher-value work. She named nonfilers and benefits fraud as areas where the IRS will say more.

Notices are the part of that agenda that will land on clients’ desks. Firms handling notice responses can prepare with an IRS notice and penalty relief pack, since a response sent in writing does not depend on the IRS phone number.

Returns that include the new deductions are the other pressure point. A 1040 checklist for 2026 returns helps catch the tips, overtime and car loan interest entries that Pleffner said still need guidance. Electronic filing through IRS e-file remains the route that avoids the paper queue Collins described.

What to watch before the 2027 season opens

The Advocate’s fiscal 2027 objectives report lists 11 priorities, among them cutting the roughly 20-month delay in resolving identity theft cases and speeding paper refund checks. It also asks for better Tax Pro online accounts and power-of-attorney recording.

The IRS has said it will keep issuing guidance on the tips, overtime and car loan interest provisions as filing season approaches. Whether Form 2848 arrives in Tax Pro Accounts in 2027 is the first test of whether practitioners can stop relying on the IRS phone number.