The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration Found That Over Half of the IRS Employees and Managers It Interviewed Were Not Aware of or Had Not Used the IRS's New AI Tools, and Recommended Mandatory Training

A law of 1998 requires the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, TIGTA, to review and certify each year the IRS's compliance with a section of the tax code that authorizes the IRS to disclose in writing certain collection activity information when requested in writing by taxpayers. Taxpayers who filed jointly and are no longer married or do not reside in the same household are entitled to certain information, including whether the IRS attempted to collect the balance due from the other individual and the amount collected. TIGTA's report, number 2026-300-052, was issued on September 16, 2026. Parts of it follow, not the whole.

A Question of Disclosure

TIGTA reviewed 100 cases worked by IRS employees from April 1, 2024, through March 31, 2025. It determined that disclosure requirements were not followed in 28 of them: taxpayers or their representatives did not receive collection information to which they were entitled, or a taxpayer's information was inappropriately disclosed.

Because the IRS does not track noncompliance with these provisions, TIGTA also interviewed 25 employees and 6 managers about what they would disclose in different situations. Twenty-one employees and five managers, the report says, "either responded incorrectly or were unsure about one or more questions related to what information should be disclosed."

Ask IRMA and Archie

The report says the IRS has recently deployed several artificial intelligence tools. For example, in 2025 it launched the Ask Internal Revenue Manual Assistant, Ask IRMA, and the Artificial Intelligence Research Companion, Archie, to assist employees with conducting research. Ask IRMA answers questions about the Internal Revenue Manual and can be used by all IRS employees. Archie, the report says, is "specifically designed to be used by contact representatives" in the IRS's Accounts Management function, and "provides responses to taxpayer questions received during phone calls and follow-on questions that taxpayers may ask."

A footnote gives the dates. Ask IRMA was first launched in April 2025 during a testing phase. Archie was launched in December 2025; as of January 2026 it had over 5,000 users, and as of February 2026 all contact representatives were expected to be using it. In March 2026, before TIGTA's interviews, all Accounts Management employees received formal notification about Archie.

Over half of the employees and managers interviewed, the report says, "were not aware of or have never used Ask IRMA." Seven of the 15 Accounts Management employees and managers interviewed "were not aware of or have never used Archie." Only 13 of the 31 had used one or both tools.

A research tool helps only the people who open it. The report counts who used the tools; whether their answers on disclosure would have been right with them is a separate question.

The Recommendation

TIGTA's one recommendation is about training. The chief of the IRS's Taxpayer Services Division, it says, "should provide mandatory training on the new artificial intelligence tools, such as Ask IRMA and Archie," to all employees in Accounts Management and Field Assistance who have direct contact with taxpayers. The training should include ways to identify guidance regarding the code's sections 6103(e)(7) and (e)(8) and to determine what information must or must not be disclosed for a jointly filed return of divorced or separated taxpayers.

IRS management agreed. It stated that it had delivered mandatory Archie and Artificial Intelligence Prompting training to all Accounts Management employees, and had incorporated the training into its Fiscal Year 2027 Critical Filing Season Readiness Training. It also stated that it will provide training on Ask IRMA to individual taxpayer advisory specialists and initial assistance representatives in Field Assistance "by November 15, 2026."