Maya Bretzius

Over the past several years, the IRS has used funding from the Inflation Reduction Act to improve taxpayer services, improve its technology and increase tax enforcement for high earners. As part of this effort, the agency has worked to transform its call center operations, making systemic improvements aimed at helping the agency’s 20,000 operators more quickly and accurately answer taxpayer questions.

Maya Bretzius, a strategic adviser at the IRS, is driving this transformation. In 2024, she introduced a method known as demand-based modeling to schedule staff more effectively during every call center shift. She is also overseeing an end-to-end overhaul of the internal systems that employees use to access taxpayer data.

“The scale and scope of impact is really hard to [overstate],” said David Padrino, former IRS chief transformation and strategy officer. “These innovations will touch so many people with improved customer service.”

Every American interacts with the IRS at some point—the agency works annually with 160 million individual filers and 60 million business filers.

The new system Bretzius designed, currently planned for full use during the 2025 filing season, will enable the IRS to predict call volume trends down to 30-minute blocks and staff call centers appropriately, leading to shorter wait times for millions of taxpayers seeking assistance. She also led an effort to reduce wait times further by developing and implementing chatbots, anticipating that many taxpayers could solve their issues online and not have to call at all.

In addition, Bretzius recognized calls took longer than necessary because customer service representatives had to wade through eight to 10 unconnected legacy data systems from the 1980s and 1990s to answer taxpayer inquiries, authenticate information, research tax history and document call notes.

To upgrade the technology, she oversaw efforts to consolidate this data into a single interface that will enable customer service representatives to quickly access taxpayers’ relevant information and provide them with tailored support. This new system is well into development, with plans for full implementation by the fall of 2025.

“Maya is the most collaborative person I’ve seen, able to pull together cross-functional teams so everyone is engaged in the process,” said Tommy Smith, director of the IRS Operations, Transformation and Strategy Office. “Everyone feels heard and is engaged.”

Estimates show that the call center and Taxpayer 360 efforts could cut wait times at the IRS by as much as 25% to 50%.

Recent workforce cuts could affect these figures, with thousands of taxpayer-service workers and contact representatives leaving the agency due to broader efforts to reduce the IRS workforce.

Nevertheless, Bretzius still believes the agency’s mission holds wide appeal.

“If you care about impacting the average person, the IRS is the most exciting place to be,” she said. “We touch every American.”