The Internal Revenue Service should have a senior level Chief Taxpayer Experience Officer, the agency recommended this week. The new position was one of several organizations the IRS proposed in a report to Congress this week in its Taxpayer First Report.The recommendations are made as a result of The Taxpayer First Act, signed into law in July 2019.
The IRS report said the experience officer “will seek to drive strategic direction for improving the taxpayer experience across the IRS- including both service and compliance interactions.” That position integrate taxpayer experience related strategies with other agency priorities and provide a holistic view of the taxpayer experience.
Taxpayer-facing program offices would be combined and centralized while there would smaller, taxpayer-focused senior leadership team led by the commissioner would be created “to ensure that taxpayer rights are foremost in our long-term planning activities.” The number of direct reports to the IRS commissioner would increase, but the size of the senior leadership team would be significantly reduced.
The organizational changes also include a proposed Enterprise Change and Innovation Division to serve as the IRS’s “strategic integrator and work with leadership across the agency to coordinate annual strategic planning and prioritization activities to streamline decision making and enable the agency to set and meet its short and long-term strategic goals.
This division would pull together Taxpayer Experience, Training, and Organizational Redesign Strategies and work on the Modernization plan, Enterprise Case Management and Digitalization strategies; and efforts led by the Human Capital and Equity Diversity and Inclusion offices “to perpetuate an integrated, collaborative, agency level strategic direction.”
The IRS also recommended creating a Relationships and Services Division that consolidates all toll-free telephone and taxpayer assistance center operations under an “Assisted Services” organization and combines all outreach activities and third-party partnership activities in one place.
The reports says there should also be a Data Office and an Enterprise Digitalization and Case Management Office “that will improve our use of data to reduce manual processes and reliance on paper while improving compliance operations and taxpayer service initiatives.”
