IRS paints a strong picture from fiscal 2024 in annual Data Book

Amid the agency’s turmoil this year, the Internal Revenue Service has some good news from 2024 regarding service and collections.

The agency helped taxpayers on 62.2 million occasions in FY24, up 3.2% over the prior fiscal year, and took in a new high in revenue, according to its latest annual Data Book detailing agency activities from Oct. 1, 2023, to last Sept. 30.

IRS toll-free customer service lines provided live telephone assistance to almost 20 million callers during the fiscal year, up some 11% from 2023. At Taxpayer Assistance Centers, the agency helped more than 2 million taxpayers in person, an increase of almost 26% over FY2023.

For the first time, revenue collected exceeded $5 trillion ($5.1 trillion), an increase of almost 9% compared to the prior fiscal year’s total.

The Data Book gives a fiscal year overview of the agency’s operations, including returns received, revenue collected, taxpayer services provided, tax returns examined (audits), efforts to collect unpaid taxes and other details. Among other FY24 highlights, the IRS:

• Launched more digital tools than it had during the previous 20 years. Online offerings saw more than 2 billion electronic taxpayer assistance transactions, 47% more than in FY23. The most popular features were requests for transcripts and Where’s My Refund? Overall, IRS.gov registered nearly 690 million individual visits with 1.7 billion page views.
• Processed more than 266 million returns and other forms from individuals, businesses and tax-exempt organizations; received almost 4.6 billion information returns; and issued close to $553 billion in refunds.
• Closed 505,514 tax return audits, resulting in $29 billion in recommended additional tax.

The net collections — federal taxes that have been reported or assessed but not paid, and returns that have not been filed — totaled almost $77.6 billion, an increase of 13.6% compared to FY23. The agency collected more than $16 billion through installment agreements, an increase of more than 12% compared to the prior fiscal year.
The Data Book also covers statistics on Direct File, taxpayer attitude surveys about satisfaction with the IRS and “acceptable” levels of cheating on taxes, and applications for tax-exempt status, among other topics.