The joys of telephoning the IRS

[cjsmith]

I managed to telephone my supposed contact person this morning. What an ordeal!

Their phone menu system has a bug in it such that the menu choice for "your return is being examined" gave me "the help line for the Earned Income Credit," a very long recording. Zero, sadly, didn't work at any time; menu system designers are getting smarter about preventing actual phone contact.

I mucked about with other menu choices and found one with a short recording. When it asked whether that answered my question, I chose NO and got put on hold for 25 minutes. Progress!

I then reached what has to have been the dimmest bulb in the history of IRS phone help. She couldn't tell me what a "mortgage or land use contract" was -- she just said "whatever you have, send it". You betcha I got HER name and badge number to use in my letter!

My contact person as named in the letter is the supervisor for this sort of thing. Unlike the person I got this morning, I suspect she has more than one brain cell. Sadly, she wasn't available by phone.

*sigh* the process continues...

(btw: after thorough reading of everything they sent me, there's absolutely no question that this is "an audit". It's a small localized one (so far), and it doesn't require me to appear in person (so far), but don't let me kid myself. It's an audit.)

Comments

[jupiter29.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I feel your frustration. Unfortunately, that's a problem with customer service in general. Your situation with the IRS is different, but I would suspect that 90% of the calls to customer service at any given company are only placed after the company has already (at least in the customers' minds) screwed up. So at that point, I guess there isn't any huge benefit to be had by hiring excellent customer service reps or intelligent programmers for a voicemail system. Once the customer is unhappy, they're going to stay unhappy.

Of course, that's a cynical view and I don't quite believe it. But my experience unfortunately leads me to believe that companies do. :(

I hope things work out with the IRS. I've never received a question like that. The only thing I've ever gotten out of season from the IRS was a note telling me that I forgot to sign my statement and I needed to sign some form and send it to them. Luckily, I didn't have to look anything up for that. ;)