An assistant expert system: assisting assistors in assisting taxpayers

Author

Beckman, Thomas J.

Author_Institution

Internal Revenue Service, Washington, DC, USA

fYear

1989

fDate

27-31 Mar 1989

Firstpage

210

Lastpage

217

Abstract

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

Keywords

financial data processing; government data processing; law administration; legislation; GAO; Government Accounting Office; Taxpayer Service Assistant; US Internal Revenue Service; expert system; tax law; telephone inquiries; Artificial intelligence; Expert systems; Government; Information retrieval; On the job training; Personnel; Protection; Quality of service; Standards publication; Telephony;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

AI Systems in Government Conference, 1989.,Proceedings of the Annual

Conference_Location

Washington, DC

Print_ISBN

0-8186-1934-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/AISIG.1989.47327

Filename

47327