Money doesn't actually talk. We do.

The IRS Hotline Team Thinks I’m One of Santa’s Elves or Something

Last week I mused about the joys of the TurboTax free question. Some readers pointed out that the fun-loving folks at the Internal Revenue Service had also set up a free, year-round tax hotline. In fact, there are numerous hotlines.

Eager to spill my fiscal guts to another complete stranger, I decided to give the IRS line a test drive and see how it fared.

Let’s put it this way – if you’re into being scolded, hold music and wasting your time, then the IRS hotline is for you.

I know that journalists give the IRS a bad rap, compounding an already evil reputation. And I’m sure that the homies at the IRS are really great people. But if they are indeed socially fantastic, it sure doesn’t translate well over the phone.

First off, you call them during business hours rather than them calling you back when it’s convenient for you (which is what TurboTax does). A passive-aggressive female voice guides you through three minutes of button-punching.

The bad news is that all this activity simply puts you in the hold queue for a while (a not-too-shabby five minutes when I called on a Tuesday morning three months before tax day). The good news is that the IRS has pretty good hold music (Beethoven, I think).

Then a human answered. Or at least I think he was a human – he introduced himself by some sort of IRS identification number, which seemed oddly science-fictionesque. I laid my question on him – the same one I sent to Turbo Tax:

My question: Should I file individually (as opposed to my parents claiming me as an exemption)? I’m under 24 and a full-time college student who lives in student housing (but I’m thousands of miles from home), but my parents do not provide more than half of my support. I work and pay for school (tuition, books, housing, food, etc.) with scholarships, personal savings and money from work that is taxed, but not part of federal work study. I’m not legally emancipated. If I am eligible to file individually, would this maximize my own return? Or is the difference the same?

Taxman Number 4,235,543 (or whatever the hell it was) seemed flustered after sentence one. He transferred me to another department so they “could fill in the details that [he] was not sure of.”

More Beethoven. Another five minutes of online Tetris.

A raspy female voice interrupted my dillydallying. She also had some apocalyptic Number Name and asked me to restate my question. I did. She immediately launched into a voice that reminded me of that time I stole a cookie from the cookie jar when I was five, then led me through a long line of tedious, jargon-packed questions.

My personal favorite came toward the end: “Do you work in a workshop?” I can’t say that I know any 21-year-olds that moonlight as carving gnomes or take commute to the North Pole to temp for Santa. But hey, if they’re out there, the IRS cares.

When I asked her to clarify some of the dense tax terms, she seemed angry and started the line of questioning all over again, telling me that “I needed to know” more about filing. She’s right, but THAT’S WHY I WAS CALLING HER.

She ultimately gave me the same answer as the TurboTax folks – I can indeed file my own return. But when I asked her follow-up questions, we got locked in a pattern of her putting me on hold for a minute, referring me to a tax document or digging up another phone number, me asking another question, her putting me on hold again…it never ended.

So after 30 minutes, only one of my questions was answered. I asked her if there was a better way to go about this.
“We don’t answer general questions,” she said. “We don’t do any type of counseling for you.” She then launched into another line of mundane questions. Sigh.

It must be tough to have to spend all day helping novices with taxes, but filling out those 1040 blank spaces is no clambake either. A little clarity and understanding would have gone a long way. I wasn’t asking for financial coddling, just some help with my upcoming return. Yet when I hung up, joining Wesley Snipes’s tax-hatin’ posse actually sounded appealing.

I politely thanked her for her time (she seemed as relieved as me for it to be over), hung up my phone and went straight to the TurboTax website. I’ve got that list of obscure tax forms and follow-up phone numbers just in case. And here, again, is the link to the IRS numbers in case you ever get really lonely or desperate.

– Mary Pilon

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