My experience with the IRS was the same. On one hand the slowness with which they operate is ridiculous (does it really take a year and a half to tell you that some documentation in your return doesn't match up? and a couple months for every subsequent response?). On the other - once they got all the required documentation they were fair, acknowledged their mistakes, and adjusted the bill accordingly (canceled, really, since once everything was refigured the total was negligible). They're a bureaucracy, but they're not really an evil bureaucracy.

I suspect the slowness and the suddenness of a "you owe us X" is pretty stressful for many people. But if you read the letters it is mostly "hey send us some stuff so we can look at it" and while drawn out.... my experiences were fair and completed normally (granted that is just one experience).

At one point I printed the wrong thing entirely... they just sent a letter telling me I sent them the wrong thing and the clock kept restarting.

The people I spoke with weren't necessarily hostile (and I was always super calm and reasonable).

It's just taking forever and they sent a lot of paperwork that conflicted with other letters they sent. They kept sending bills stating I owed X by Y when in reality I had sent in what they asked for which would null those bills a month before that bill arrived.

The people on the phone also typically said they can't help because the questions I were asking could only be answered by my auditor, but I was never allowed to talk to that person.

Customer support is something I partly do for a living (supporting the video courses I create) and I think keeping people in the loop and providing more information rather than less is really important when something goes wrong. No one wants to feel like they are getting ignored or tossed around in a system with millions of others.

For context, I single handily do personal 1 on 1 support for around 40,000 people and it doesn't take that long because I invested a lot of time in my product and systems to make things as streamlined as possible. I'm confident I could continue giving high levels of personal support even with 100,000 people just based on time spent doing support now vs doing other things.

Here's a fun fact. As of 2014, the IRS had 94,516 employees. I'm sure it's grown since then, there's also 325 million people in the US. I know not each employee deals with customer service but that's a ratio of 1 IRS employee to every 3,438 citizens of the US. Even if only half of those people are doing customer related services, that's an abysmal ratio -- especially considering those people are doing that job full time and the IRS has spent a ridiculous amount of money running this operation (11 billion+ a year) to create a nearly unusable product.