Improving the taxpayer experience

When the IRS sent any of its 200,000,000 notices each year, it drew from 1,000 different templates, written by 120 authors, produced on any of 40 different systems. So, it’s not surprising that the taxpayers receiving these notices wound up confused and frustrated. The IRS asked my company to improve its notices.

The challenge 
Through interviews and analysis of the letters sent by the IRS, we realized that the letters reflected the IRS’s organizational structure rather than taxpayer needs. Often these letters lacked a logical framework and did not take advantage of current technologies that could customize a notice with information important to the taxpayer.

Determining that just a few dozen letters could serve as models for 70% of all IRS correspondence, we restructured and rewrote 37 notices—organizing them around taxpayer needs (such as:  I owe money, the IRS owes me money, I need to provide more information). Testing showed significant increases in both comprehension and the perception of simplicity, and that taxpayers would be more likely to pay. This translates not only into more tax revenue, but also significantly less frustration and fear for recipients. After such positive research results, the IRS adopted our recommendations and we created a much larger modular correspondence system that standardizes layout, navigation, content and tone of voice—ensuring the consistency and simplicity of all letters.

Obviously, these notices don’t exist in a vacuum. These notices directed taxpayers to irs.gov to find additional resources, but finding relevant information—by navigating there or by searching—was not a straightforward process. Though we could not affect the overall structure of irs.gov, we were successful in expanding this project to include notice-specific resource pages. These new web pages reinforce the notice content and supple­ment it with resources that taxpayers need. The pages reflect the structure of the new notices, emphasizing the reason for each notice and what the taxpayer needs to do.

My role

• Analyzing existing IRS notices and taxpayer communications from other countries and irs.gov
• Helping craft the structure and content of the revised notices
• Designing a standard format for notice-related web pages
• Drafting questions for quantitative testing, analyzing findings and suggesting revisions based on research 

The result
A notice framework—and accompanying web pages—organized around taxpayer needs, which takes better advantage of existing technological capabilities and standardizes the structure for navigation, content and layout of taxpayer notices. The framework was adopted by the IRS; the notices I helped create went into production—and out to taxpayers—beginning in 2010.