If a place where you do business answered your call once out of every 10 attempts you made, chances are you would be looking to take your business elsewhere.

Regrettably, when it comes to the Internal Revenue Service, we don’t have options, which makes dealing with this agency all the more maddening.

Every year, starting in early January, we are told to prepare ourselves for another tax season from hell. Every year, we are fed the same litany of reasons why our tax returns are not going to be processed in a timely manner, why we aren’t going to get our refund checks as soon as we had been hoping and, if we need to talk to a human at the IRS, forget it.

For years, the IRS has been dealing with budget cuts, too few employees, too few knowledgeable employees, a do-more-with-less mentality and a host of other issues.

But help may be on the way. Congress passed and President Biden recently signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes $80 billion over a 10-year period for the IRS to beef up enforcement and to start a technology modernization program intended to speed up the tax-return process.

I have some sympathy for the agency. After all, we asked the IRS to deliver millions of stimulus payment checks in three rounds then reconcile those payments over two tax seasons. And let’s not forget the advance child tax credit payments to help families devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to information provided by Erin Collins, national taxpayer advocate in her midyear report to Congress, the IRS received 167 million calls during the 2021 filing season. Many involved the backlog in processing returns, but, get this, the agency answered just 9% of those seeking assistance.

During the 2021 filing season, the IRS fielded 73 million calls from taxpayers, but just 10% of these calls ever found their way to an IRS person. So, the way I look at this is that although the IRS received fewer than half the number of calls compared to the previous year, its level of customer service has remained about the same ­­- pitiful.

I’ve been writing about this problem for years. Members of Congress had been promising that a fix is coming, but it took until now for any movement of any consequence. With passage of the new legislation, the IRS says things will get significantly better. Seven years ago, I wrote: “While it borders on the unfathomable, the IRS has been hanging up on us customers and clients for years, but 2015’s number was striking in the extreme. Compared to 2014, this was an increase of about 1,518%.”

In typical government fashion, it calls these hang-ups “courtesy disconnects,” a euphemism for an overloaded system that automatically hangs up on a caller when there’s no one to answer the phone.

In some cases, when you combine return processing and correspondence delays, it can be well over a year before the IRS resolves an issue and people get their refunds.

Through the first half of 2022, the IRS processed more than 5 million taxpayer responses to proposed adjustments to their returns. On average, it took the agency 251 days to respond, more than triple the 74 days in 2019, according to Collins.

If you have the unenviable task of trying to reach a human at the IRS, here’s a suggestion: Make yourself a pot of coffee and start a load of wash, because the average time spent waiting on hold increased from 20 to 29 minutes, Collins said in her report. This, however, doesn’t take into account the true picture, because many frustrated taxpayers throw in the towel and hang up.

I have been fortunate that my tax refunds have always arrived without serious delay, but I know several friends who live from paycheck-to-paycheck and desperately need their refund checks sooner rather than later. Checking their mailbox becomes a much-anticipated daily ritual, which is too often accompanied by additional frustration. (I gave them a tip and pass it along to you, too: If you ask for your refund to be direct-deposited into your account, you will get it a lot faster.)

If all of this weren’t enough, for the last decade or more, identity thefts of taxpayers’ information has further complicated getting a “clean” return filed in a timely manner and one which does not raise IRS flags to further delay the process.

Collins said the IRS, just as many other employers, is in a bind to find enough people to do the job. “Being a customer service representative right now is incredibly difficult,” she said in her report. “They have a lot of stress. A lot of them are working overtime. It’s not the fault of the employees. The employees are doing everything they can to help taxpayers. It’s just we don’t have enough bodies.”

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.