Dept. of Revenue callers get busy tone

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) - If you called the Indiana Department of Revenue with tax questions within the past couple of days, you may not have gotten the answer you expected.

In fact, you may not have gotten an answer at all. 

Tax season is busy season at the Indiana Department of Revenue right now. When you call with your tax questions, you don't expect to hear a busy signal. But it happened to several hundred callers. In other cases, callers got a quick, "thank you for calling, goodbye."

"That was a default response that we didn't realize was even out there. So we've learned a little bit in this process, too," says Mike Alley Commissioner of the Indiana Department of Revenue.  Unexpected call volume he says was the source of the problem. 

"We received about 7,000 instances of calls and call attempts, which is an extraordinarily high volume for us," Alley said.

Alley says normal call volume is 3,000 to 3,200 calls a day. Notices sent out to Indiana businesses that were late with their payroll and sales tax withholdings he says, pushed the call volume beyond capacity. 

"And so that actually represented about 100,000 extra pieces of mail that we sent out last weekend and early this week that would have generated calls from those business taxpayers," Alley says. 

The Department of Revenue has 161 dedicated lines in the department. Not all are used for taxpayer questions, but changes have been made now to the hardware.

"We've reconfigured some of the lines so that we do have more lines and more capacity coming in, Alley says. 

Staff has been shifted between departments to help answer the calls because busy season shouldn't include busy signals.

Commissioner Alley says you can help, too, by calling in the early morning or later in the day.  The phones open at 7:30 a.m. You can also send in an email with your questions. Alley says staff will work this weekend to get the emails answered. Click here for the department website.