An assistant expert system: assisting assistors in assisting taxpayers

The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employs 5000 assistors to answer telephone inquiries from taxpayers. The author describes the design and development of an expert system, the Taxpayer Service Assistant (TSA), that helps assistors provide advice to taxpayers on tax law topics. As measured by the GAO (US Government Accounting Office), these assistors provide correct and complete answers on only 63% of the 18 million calls on tax law that are received yearly. The IRS is exploring text retrieval and expert systems as alternative methodologies for supporting assistors and improving the quality of service. The author examines the tradeoffs made by each approach and shows why expert systems are more likely to be effective