The National Taxpayer Advocate has released their Annual Report to Congress, which delivers a careful forecast for the upcoming filing season. The report outlines that last year’s comparatively smooth performance may not continue in 2026.

According to National Taxpayer Advocate Erin M. Collins, last year’s taxpayer service was strong because the IRS entered the season with its largest workforce in years and did not face any major, midstream tax law implementation demands. These conditions, she said, no longer apply as the agency heads into 2026 with steep staffing reductions, leadership churn, and a complicated set of retroactive law changes tied to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. 

The report argues that most taxpayers should still fare well if their returns aren’t diverted by IRS processing filters and are uncomplicated and filed electronically. However, the report noted that the real problem may lie in the IRS's ability to assist the millions of filers who encounter snags, including refund delays, identity theft cases, and correspondence backlogs. It cited persistent delays in resolving identity theft victim assistance cases and reiterated calls to keep those teams focused on casework until resolution times fall to a more reasonable window, while warning that reduced staffing levels could make it harder for the IRS to prevent small problems from turning into long-running account issues.  

 Collins additionally highlights the issue of focusing on telephone coverage over case processing, an operational tradeoff that the agency currently faces. She urges the IRS to shift away from the “Level of Service” benchmark in favor of measures that more effectively capture whether calls actually result in timely, accurate resolution. Finally, the report flags both optimism and risk in the IRS’s push to digitize paper processing through the “Zero Paper Initiative,” warning against hollowing out internal capacity before new scanning and OCR approaches are fully validated, especially given the sensitivity of taxpayer data and recent contractor-related breaches.