The Internal Revenue Service doesn’t plan to renew a $500,000 annual contract to repair the self-service kiosks at its walk-in Taxpayer Assistance Centers across the country after a contractor failed to keep many of them in working order and the kiosks were seeing less use by the public.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reported Monday that the IRS now plans to discontinue the kiosk program, which dates back to 2011, and focus instead on other self-service options for taxpayers. The kiosks are computer terminals designed to give taxpayers tools and support to help themselves access IRS services. For instance, a taxpayer can use a kiosk to obtain tax transcripts from previous years or apply for an Employer Identification Number. In August 2024, the IRS had 100 kiosks located at 37 Taxpayer Assistance Centers around the U.S. But TIGTA found that only 55 of those kiosks were operational, 40 were inoperable, and the status of the other five was unknown.
The number of taxpayers using kiosks has drastically plummeted in recent years. In 2017, over 80,000 taxpayers used the kiosks, but from January through July 2024, only 4,600 taxpayers used kiosks. The fact that many of the kiosks are outdated and inoperable may explain the decrease in usage.
IRS employees said the contractor was slow to respond to service requests, which made kiosks inoperable for long periods of time. The IRS paid approximately $500,000 annually to the contractor. The IRS said it planned to work with the contractor to make the kiosks operational by the end of December 2024. However, it was a different story a month later.
“In January 2025, we visited eight TACs with inoperable kiosks and found the machines were still not working,” said the report. “We subsequently learned the IRS did not exercise the contract’s option year for 2025, and the agency was discontinuing the kiosk program. IRS management did not state plans to cancel the contract until after we expressed concerns about the number of inoperable kiosks. While we support the IRS’s decision to discontinue the current kiosk program, we believe that offering taxpayers a self-service option could be beneficial as the IRS reduces and restructures its workforce.”
When a kiosk was not working, the TAC manager submitted a service ticket to the contractor. According to IRS management, 137 service tickets were outstanding from February 2023 through August 2024. TIGTA found 24 tickets were open, meaning the contractor had not performed work on these tickets. The time needed to close the remaining 113 tickets ranged from 30 days or less to 463 days.
The IRS is now looking at providing more self-service options that taxpayers can use at home. Earlier this year, plans leaked out from the IRS to close 110 of the Taxpayer Assistance Centers as the agency moves ahead with widespread staffing reductions.
“Since the installation of the FSA [Facilitated Self-Assistance] kiosks in 2011, the technology gradually became outdated,” wrote Kenneth Corbin, chief of the IRS’s Taxpayer Services Division, in response to the report. “To address the challenge of aged and failing equipment, we worked with external stakeholders to improve how we tracked and prioritized maintenance. This strengthened our ability to manage repairs and monitor availability across locations. However, based on performance data and user feedback, we determined that the aging equipment no longer met service expectations or supported the needs of taxpayers. For that reason, we decided not to exercise an additional option year of the contract. We will focus on improving digital access to taxpayer services and delivering efficient, dependable support for all taxpayers. We are exploring modern, cost-effective alternatives that ensure continued access to reliable self-service tools.”
