Preface 2025

The National Taxpayer Advocate’s Preface describes many of the challenges taxpayers faced this year and offers a Taxpayer Rights and Service Assessment measuring how the agency is doing in protecting and furthering taxpayer rights and reducing taxpayer burden.

Introductory Remarks by the National Taxpayer Advocate

The past year has been one of extraordinary transition for the IRS. The agency began the year with its largest workforce in recent memory, and then after absorbing a 27% reduction, it ended the year with one of its smallest. Reductions of this magnitude almost surely will affect operations, particularly in areas that already depend heavily on manual work and experienced employees, such as processing correspondence, amended returns, and other account adjustments, including identity theft cases. As the IRS enters the 2026 filing season while implementing extensive changes enacted by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the agency’s challenge will be to ensure that taxpayers continue to receive timely service and fair treatment, even as it operates with fewer resources.

Taxpayers want, and deserve, a 21st century tax administration – one that provides clear communication, transparent processing timeframes, secure digital options that resolve problems, and a smooth handoff to live assistance when automation is not sufficient. The good news is that improvement is achievable. The operational gains seen in 2024 and 2025, along with Congress’s enactment of targeted bipartisan taxpayer protections, show that practical reforms can translate into better outcomes for millions of taxpayers. The task now is to make those gains durable so that service does not improve only when conditions are unusually favorable, but remains reliable through workforce constraints, major law changes, and inevitable future disruptions. That requires sustained modernization and, equally important, modern performance measurement. Success should be defined by what taxpayers deserve: timely refunds, accurate information, first-contact resolution where possible, and timely processing of cases that cannot be resolved on a phone call.

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“Over the past five years, I have had the opportunity to closely observe the extraordinary amount of planning, coordination, and sustained effort required each year to deliver a successful filing season. Filing season is not a single event; it is a year-round undertaking that depends on the alignment of technology, staffing, training, legal guidance, and operational execution across the IRS that begins six to 12 months before the start of the filing season. When this alignment works well, taxpayers experience predictability and timely service. When it does not, the consequences are immediate and sometimes financially devastating.”

Erin M. Collins, National Taxpayer Advocate

Taxpayer Rights and Service Assessment: IRS Performance Measures and Data Relating to Taxpayer Rights and Service

The Taxpayer Rights and Service Assessment provides the IRS, Congress, and other stakeholders with an annual “report card” to evaluate how the agency protects taxpayer rights and provides various services to taxpayers. This report card highlights the enormous volume of returns and information documents processed by the IRS, the breadth of services provided to taxpayers, and key compliance actions undertaken during the three recently completed fiscal years. Each performance measure is examined through the lens of the Taxpayer Bill of Rights to assess how effectively the IRS is meeting its obligations to taxpayers. A comparison of the services provided by the IRS and its compliance actions across three fiscal years provides insight into the agency’s progress – and continued challenges – in embedding the Taxpayer Bill of Rights into the administration of the tax system.