With its funding restricted within the 2014 Appropriations Bill, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner has indicated that taxpayers will have to exercise patience when trying to contact the agency. Among other problems the agency will not be able to answer 30 percent of calls made to it by taxpayers. From 2010, IRS funding and staffing have been cut by 8 percent, despite a steady increase in the agency’s workload. The IRS was able to answer only 61 percent of calls from taxpayers seeking assistance from a customer service representative – a number that left 20m taxpayers unable to get through to the IRS on the phone – and there has been an 86 percent drop in tax law questions answered, from 795,000 10 years ago to only 110,000 in the 2013 filing season.