During the 2026 filing season, the IRS received 48.1 million phone calls but answered just 9.9 million. That’s only 21%. As Blake Oliver put it on Episode 495 of The Accounting Podcast, “79% of the time when you call the IRS, you hang up before you get somebody because the wait times are that long.”
Blake and David Leary recorded this Independence Day episode on Friday, July 3rd, covering everything from the IRS’s service failures to Trump accounts going live on July 4th. They even shared a wild story about EY staff accessing Australia’s Prime Minister’s bank account. But it’s the IRS story that really captures where the profession stands right now, caught between a federal agency that can’t serve taxpayers and new AI tools that are changing how tax work gets done.
The IRS Report Card: Success and Failure at the Same Time
The National Taxpayer Advocate, Erin M. Collins, issued her midyear report with a positive-sounding headline: the IRS “largely succeeded” in the 2026 filing season. That’s actually impressive given that the agency faced a 27% staffing reduction, major tax law changes, and leadership turnover. Technology modernization helped keep things running.
But while the IRS kept the machinery working for routine returns, anyone needing individual help ran into serious problems. More than 14 million of the 139 million individual returns filed got suspended for additional review. Over a million taxpayers waited beyond normal processing times for refunds, with delays averaging about 5.5 weeks. Identity theft victims face an average of 20 months for case resolution, with over 500,000 cases still pending at the end of the filing season.
The Trump administration’s push to move federal agencies away from paper checks created its own mess. The IRS sent about 4 million notices to taxpayers whose returns lacked valid direct deposit information. The problem is, most of these taxpayers are unbanked, elderly, or living abroad, don’t have online accounts, and struggle to create them. The notices had poor instructions about requesting waivers, and as Blake pointed out, they didn’t even mention that taxpayers could request a paper check waiver by calling the 1040 phone line.
Speaking of that phone line, the numbers are getting worse, not better. The IRS answered 21% of calls this season with an average hold time of 14 minutes. Last season, they answered 25% of calls, with an average wait of eight minutes.
Every Door Is Broken
If you can’t get through on the phone, maybe you could walk into an IRS Taxpayer Assistance Center for in-person help? The Treasury Inspector General decided to find out, conducting 91 unannounced “secret shopping” visits at 82 different centers nationwide.
Of the 91 visits, 30 failed completely. Either the building was unexpectedly closed, security wouldn’t let them in, or they couldn’t get a real answer. Of the 61 “successful” visits in which someone actually spoke with an IRS employee, 28 received incorrect assistance. That’s nearly half.
“That’s like almost half the time if you go to an IRS Taxpayer Assistance Center, if you get in the door, you’re probably going to get the wrong answer,” David said.
A review of the IRS’s expanding chatbot and live chat options found that 60% of live chat assistors were handling multiple chats at once. That’s normal for a call center, but one report claimed an assistor was handling 603 chats simultaneously. Both hosts found that number impossible to believe. The automated chatbot wasn’t much better, failing to provide enough information or recognize what taxpayers were typing in 29 responses and 44 keywords or questions.
Behind all this is another problem because the IRS can’t even track its own data. A new Inspector General report found the agency has about 1,124 data-sharing agreements with different states and agencies. Ohio alone has 42 separate agreements. But the kicker is, 30 of these agreements are completely unknown to the IRS’s own privacy office. As David explained, “There’s just IRS data going out to third parties, other government agencies that the IRS does not know is happening.”
AI Tools Fill the Void
“Hey, all of this means tax professionals will continue to be in demand,” Blake observed. And increasingly, those professionals turn to AI tools to handle the grunt work.
Blake described how he treats Claude as a coworker. Using Wispr Flow dictation software on his Mac, he can now just hold down the function key and speak to the AI. “It’s way faster than typing,” he said.
The hosts shared a listener example. Florida’s Board of Accountancy requires CPAs to enter each CPE course separately into its web portal. The listener had manually typed about 80 different courses last year. This year, he pointed Claude’s Cowork at a folder containing all his CPE certificates and had it create a consolidated Excel list, validate it against the PDFs, then log into the portal and enter everything automatically. The AI even caught and corrected its own duplicate entries without being told. “Cowork took care of this tedious task in the background while I caught up on the show Severance on Apple TV,” the listener shared.
KPMG is taking this further with Tax Sim, an AI simulation tool that trains tax professionals through rapid scenarios, replacing the routine prep work that junior staff used to learn on. As Blake explained, it’s like a high-performance racing simulator where users encounter many scenarios quickly and improve through feedback.
Other Major Stories from the Episode
The hosts also covered several other significant developments:
- Trump Accounts go live. These new savings accounts for children born between 2025 and 2028 began accepting contributions on July 4th, with the Treasury contributing $1,000 per child. The catch is children gain full control at age 18, and, unlike 529 plans, distributions are taxable. But there’s a strategy. You can convert it to a Roth IRA at 18 when the child is in a low tax bracket. According to one analysis, $200,000 in a Trump account could potentially grow to $9.6 million tax-free over 42 years after Roth conversion.
- Australian Big Four scandals. Two EY graduates on an audit engagement at Commonwealth Bank accessed the accounts of the Prime Minister and an EY partner. They’ve been fired and, as David noted, “they’re never going to work in accounting again.” This is just the latest in a series of Australian Big Four scandals that have the government talking about breaking up the firms, splitting audit and consulting divisions, and requiring mandatory audit firm rotation every 20 years.
- Coca-Cola’s $20 Billion tax fight. The company faces potential exposure of $20 billion in a transfer pricing dispute with the IRS, but has only reserved half a billion for the loss on its books. That’s a potentially nasty surprise for investors.
The Bigger Picture
The 2026 filing season tells two stories at once. The IRS survived a brutal year institutionally, but it’s failing the individual taxpayers who need help. For tax professionals, this creates an opportunity and a responsibility. Taxpayers need someone who can actually answer their questions and resolve their issues. The responsibility is hard to ignore. The people hit hardest by these failures are often those who can’t afford professional help.
As Blake and David make clear throughout the episode, pairing human expertise with AI tools that can handle the tedious compliance work will help firms thrive. The void the IRS leaves behind becomes a competitive advantage for the prepared firm.
Want to hear the full discussion, including more details on Trump accounts, the Australian scandals, and practical AI workflows? Listen to episode 495 of The Accounting Podcast. You can even earn free CPE for listening through Earmark.