IRS Taxpayer Assistance Centers Gave Incorrect Tax Advice

‍A new report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has found that the IRS's Taxpayer Assistance Centers, the walk-in office network the Internal Revenue Service maintains for in-person help, gave incorrect tax law answers in nearly half of the visits where a full answer was provided.

Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration auditors made 91 unannounced visits to 82 IRS Taxpayer Assistance Center locations during the 2025 filing season. In 28 of 61 visits that produced full assistance on a tax law question, guidance was incorrect, according to Report 2026-108-034, issued June 29, 2026. That means taxpayers who received a complete answer from an IRS employee got the wrong information close to 46% of the time, a rate that raises real questions about the quality of taxpayer services many Americans rely on when phone lines and IRS.gov cannot resolve a tax issue on their own.

TIGTA is the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the independent federal watchdog responsible for overseeing IRS operations. Its unannounced-visit testing program is one of the few tools available for measuring, in a hands-on way, whether IRS employees are giving taxpayers accurate answers to tax law questions at the point of contact rather than after the fact, when an incorrect tax return has already been filed.

The audit used a judgmental nonprobability sample of 82 locations from 363 TACs and cannot be projected nationwide. TIGTA conducted 53 regular weekday visits, 28 extended-hour visits, and 10 Saturday Taxpayer Experience Day visits, a mix designed to capture how taxpayer assistance centers perform across the different scheduling windows the IRS offers working taxpayers who cannot get to an IRS office during standard business hours.

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The 91-Visit Results

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These five mutually exclusive outcome rows sum to 91. Separately, 61 visits produced full assistance (33 correct + 28 incorrect) and 30 did not (19 brief + 9 security + 2 closures). Source: TIGTA Report 2026-108-034, Figure 2 (assisted vs. not-assisted by service period) and narrative pp. 5–6 (brief-interaction, security-denial, and closure counts). The 33 correct answers reflect a GetTaxReliefNow calculation: 61 fully assisted minus 28 incorrect.

TIGTA TAC audit: 91 total visits, 61 full assistance, 33 correct, 28 incorrect, 19 brief, 9 security, 2 closed. TIGTA Report 2026-108-034, Figure 2 and narrative pp. 5–6. Correct-answer count calculated by GetTaxReliefNow.

Two of those categories describe access problems as much as accuracy problems, and both are worth a closer look. Nine of the 91 visits ended in a security denial, meaning security guards refusing admittance kept the tester from ever reaching a TAC employee to ask a tax law question. Two visits found unexpected closures of some facilities when they were supposed to be open, leaving the taxpayer with no service option at all for that stop. Taken together with the 19 brief interactions, 30 of the 91 total visits, close to a third, ended without a tax law question being fully answered at all, before the accuracy of any advice even came into play.

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The Three Tax Topics Tested

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Source: TIGTA Report 2026-108-034, narrative pp. 5–6.

TIGTA tested three tax topics. Injured-spouse: 20 incorrect. Home sale: 4 incorrect. AOTC: 4 incorrect. TIGTA Report 2026-108-034, pp. 5–6.

TIGTA testers posed these three tax law questions to IRS employees at each stop, chosen to reflect situations that come up regularly for taxpayers filing a tax return or amending one. The injured-spouse allocation question alone accounted for 20 of the 28 incorrect answers, or roughly 71% of every wrong response TIGTA recorded. The other two topics, capital gain treatment on the sale of a main home after a work relocation and eligibility for the American Opportunity Tax Credit under Form 8863, each produced four incorrect responses.

The concentration of errors on a single topic suggests the problem is not evenly spread across the tax code but clustered around a specific, technical area of it. That pattern matters for how the IRS designs future training, since a general refresher on tax law questions may do less to fix the error rate than targeted instruction on the injured-spouse rules specifically.

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What Injured-Spouse Allocation Means

Injured-spouse allocation under Form 8379 generally allows a taxpayer to claim their portion of a joint refund applied to the other spouse's past-due state income tax, child support, or federal non-tax debt. It is distinct from innocent-spouse relief under Form 8857, which addresses liability for tax owed on a joint tax return rather than the diversion of a refund toward a spouse's separate debt.

Because the rules governing injured-spouse allocation intersect with refund processing, IRS records on a joint account, and offset procedures across multiple government agencies, it is an area where even experienced IRS employees can give an incorrect tax return answer if they are not current on the tax code as it applies to Form 8379. Given that this single topic generated the large majority of incorrect responses in TIGTA's sample, taxpayers asking about injured-spouse allocation at any IRS office may want to independently verify the answer against IRS.gov before filing.

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Appointment and No-Show Findings

In 17 of 19 brief-interaction visits, same-day appointments were available within one hour but not offered. Of 63,512 no-show appointments from February through March 2025, 60,984 were not closed within 15 minutes, keeping slots from reopening.

17 of 19 brief visits had available same-day appointments not offered. 60,984 of 63,512 no-shows were not closed within 15 minutes. TIGTA Report 2026-108-034, appointment-management findings.

These findings point to a second, related service gap beyond the accuracy of the advice itself: many taxpayers who could have been fully helped that same day were turned away or given only a brief interaction, even though open appointment capacity existed at the TAC. The no-show data suggests the problem extends well beyond the audit sample. Because tens of thousands of no-show slots stayed open in the IRS system rather than reopening promptly, taxpayers who wanted to schedule an appointment or make an appointment on short notice may have found none available, even when the underlying capacity was there.

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IRS Response

IRS management agreed with all four TIGTA recommendations:

1. Automatically close no-show appointments after 15 minutes and notify staff of newly available appointment slots. This recommendation targets the 60,984 no-shows that stayed open in the scheduling system rather than reopening. Automating the closeout process is meant to convert unused appointment slots back into same-day availability for walk-in taxpayers instead of leaving them idle for the rest of the day.
   
   
2. Ensure all TAC employees receive refresher training on checking for available appointments to accommodate walk-in taxpayers. This directly addresses the 17 of 19 brief-interaction visits where an open same-day slot existed but was never offered to the taxpayer. The recommendation assumes the capacity is often there; the gap is staff awareness of it in the moment.
   
   
3. Determine the feasibility of adding a prompt in the appointment scheduling system to remind employees to use the ITLA tool before closing a tax-law-related appointment. ITLA is the internal research tool IRS employees are expected to check before finalizing an answer to a tax law question. A system-level prompt already builds a verification step directly into the workflow, because the IRS actually deployed this exact feature back in December 2025.
   
   
4. Ensure TAC employees complete annual refresher training on ITLA-tool use, emphasizing potential disciplinary action for failure to follow procedures. This recommendation goes beyond a one-time fix and calls for recurring, mandatory training, paired with an accountability mechanism, on the tool most directly tied to whether an answer to a tax law question is accurate.

Taken together, the four recommendations split roughly into two categories: fixing the scheduling system so appointment capacity is not wasted, and reinforcing the use of the ITLA tool so answers to tax law questions are checked against current guidance before being given. The IRS agreeing to all four suggests it accepts that both the appointment system and staff training on the IRS system used to research tax law questions need adjustment.

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Limitations

The TIGTA sample was judgmental and non-probability, 82 locations from 363. Results cannot be projected to all TACs. The three topics tested do not represent every TAC function.

That distinction matters for how taxpayers and tax professionals should interpret the 28-of-61 figure. It describes what TIGTA's testers experienced at these specific locations, on these three tax law questions, during this specific window of the 2025 filing season. It is not a nationwide error rate for every IRS office, and it says nothing about the accuracy of guidance on the many other tax issues TAC employees handle every day, from refund status questions to notice responses to help complete an amended tax return.

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What a Taxpayer Should Do

1. Document the date, time, location, and what you were told. Write down the specifics of the visit as soon as possible, ideally the same day, while your memory of the conversation is fresh. This record becomes the foundation for everything that follows, including a reasonable-cause argument if a penalty is later assessed based on that guidance.
   
   
2. Preserve any written materials. If the IRS employee handed you a printout, a worksheet, or written notes, keep the originals. Written documentation carries more weight than a taxpayer's recollection of an oral conversation and may matter if you later pursue penalty relief tied to erroneous advice.
   
   
3. Verify guidance against IRS.gov publications. Before filing a tax return or making a financial decision based on what you were told, check the relevant IRS publication or instructions yourself. This step can catch an error before it becomes part of a filed tax return rather than after, when correcting it is more involved.
   
   
4. Consider an amended return or penalty-abatement request. If you already filed based on incorrect guidance, an amended tax return using Form 1040-X may be needed to correct the underlying tax. If a penalty was assessed as a result, a separate penalty abatement request, such as a Form 843 filing, first-time abatement, or a reasonable-cause argument, may apply depending on your specific facts.
   
   
5. Contact the Taxpayer Advocate Service at 1-877-777-4778 if facing significant hardship. The Taxpayer Advocate Service, often called TAS, is an independent organization within the IRS. It steps in specifically when a taxpayer cannot resolve a tax issue through normal IRS channels or is experiencing significant hardship as a result of an IRS error, including incorrect guidance from an IRS employee. Taxpayers can also file Form 911 to request TAS assistance directly.

Before your next visit, it is also worth confirming your local Taxpayer Assistance Center's current hours on IRS.gov, since two of the 91 visits in this audit ended in an unexpected closure that the taxpayer had no way to anticipate in advance.

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Sources

• TIGTA Report 2026-108-034, June 29, 2026. tigta.gov
• IRS Form 8379. irs.gov
• IRS Taxpayer Advocate Service. irs.gov/taxpayer-advocate

Educational content based on government sources. Not legal advice.