CS-20-515 Tax Stats Website Survey Supporting Statement

Supporting Statement

OMB Information Collection (ICR) Approval Request to Conduct

Customer Satisfaction Research (OMB #)

Title of Research: Tax Stats Website Customer Satisfaction Survey 2020

1. JUSTIFICATION

1. Circumstances Making the Collection of Information Necessary

Statistics of Income (SOI) maintains a variety of information and products on its public website irs.gov/statistics to provide to the public. While SOI has made some recent minor changes to the website, more extensive changes are planned for the near future. SOI wants to collect customer feedback on the current website experience, as well as what new features customers would like to see added. After the more extensive changes are made, SOI will again solicit customer feedback to compare how the experience has changed.

2. Purpose and Use of the Information Collection

SOI would like to understand the level of satisfaction with the current information / customer experience on irs.gov/statistics and determine what areas need additional work to meet customer needs and enhance their experience. Without collecting feedback, SOI will not know what areas need to be addressed, nor will they be able to make any comparisons once future surveys are done to evaluate the updated website.

3. Consideration Given to Information Technology

This survey will be conducted online using the Verint EFM Survey Tool. The survey will be administered by SOI Mathematical Statisticians on the Servicewide Support Team who have a license to use the Verint EFM Survey Tool. Any questions about the survey can be sent to that team’s organizational email address to be addressed by the administrators. Participants can access the survey via a link on the website itself or via a link sent out via GovDelivery to all of the Tax Stats Listserv members. Given the nature of the administration of this survey, no identifying information for respondents will be known. Respondents will use the Verint EFM tool to complete the survey. SOI survey administrators will download the data and provide aggregated analysis to SOI website staff.

4. Duplication of Information

This survey will provide valuable information that is not available in any internal IRS data source.

5. Reducing the Burden on Small Entities

This survey is short and aims at collecting the most pertinent information from our customers in order to address concerns and make changes that would improve the user experience There is no cost burden for this survey. There is no other way to obtain this valuable information.

6. Consequences of Not Conducting Collection

Without this feedback, SOI will not have critical feedback from an important stakeholder constituency needed to assess the customer experience using our website, nor will SOI be able to identify areas that require improvements.

7. Special Circumstances

There are no special circumstances relating to this request. The information collected will be voluntary and will not be used for statistical purposes.

8. Consultations with Persons Outside the Agency

No one outside of the Agency has been consulted with.

9. Payment or Gift:

SOI will not provide payment or other forms of remuneration to survey respondents.

10. Confidentiality:

SOI will apply and meet fair information and record-keeping practices to ensure privacy to the extent allowed by law protection of all taxpayers. This includes criteria for disclosure—laid out in the Privacy Act of 1974, the Freedom of Information Act, and Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code—all of which provide for the protection of taxpayer information as well as its release to authorized recipients.

The survey will not contain tax return or taxpayer information, nor is it related to tax information. Survey participants will not be identified in any of the documents or files used for this project. We will limit and control the amount of information we collect to those items that are necessary to accomplish the research questions. We will carefully safeguard the security of data utilized as well as the privacy to the extent allowed by law of the survey respondents.

11. Sensitive Nature

No questions will be asked that are of a personal or sensitive nature.

12. Burden of Information Collection –

The average time of survey completion is expected to be about 5 minutes.

For the website link part of the survey, we do not know for sure how many of our users will actually read the alert or survey advertisement. However, we do know that we have an average of 160k unique page views per month with the average user navigating 10-15 pages to find what they need per visit. This results in about 10,000 unique visitors per month. So we can estimate that if everyone were to take 30 seconds to read the information, that would amount to 83 burden hours.

For the listserv, we need to calculate the time taken to read the survey invite from the listserv message. While we know that our listserv currently has 159,409 subscribers, we also realize that small percentage of subscribers will read our email. According to GovDelivery reports, our bounce back rate is 2.7% and our open rate is currently 10.4%. That means 16,102 people may read our invitation. We estimate it takes 30 seconds to read the email. ((16,102 x 30)/60)/60 = 134 hours of burden.

For participants, total time to complete the survey is 5 minutes. We estimate that 5% of those who read the invitation either sent through the listserv or advertised on the website will participate in the survey, yielding 1,300 respondents. The time burden for participants is (1300 x 5)/60 = 108 burden hours.

The total burden hours for the survey is (83 + 134 + 108) = 325 burden hours.

Type of Collection	Participation	Response Time	Total Burden (hours)
Potential Respondents Contacted	26,102	30 seconds	217
Expected Participants	1,300	5 minutes	108
Grand Total Burden			325

13. Costs to Respondents

There is no dollar cost to respondents. The total estimated annual cost burden to respondents is $8,118.50. The surveys take place across the United States with all cross-sections of firms that represent IRS contractors (e.g. large firms, small firms to multiple socioeconomic designations, etc.). This estimate was created using the mean hourly wage for all occupations ($24.98) from the BLS May 2018 National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates - United States.

14. Cost of Federal Government

There is no direct cost to the Federal Government. The survey will be administered through SOI resources.

15. Reason for Change

This is a new survey.

16. Tabulation of Results, Schedule, Analysis Plans

Analysis will be based on the responses provided by participants. Analysis will include the frequency of scores from survey responses, in addition to written feedback compiled by SOI. The results will not be published, but only used internally for website improvement purposes.

17. Display of OMB Approval Date

IRS is seeking approval to not display the expiration date for OMB approval, as this is a one-time, limited-duration collection.

18. Exceptions to Certification for Paperwork Reduction Act Submissions

These activities comply with the requirements in 5 CFR 1320.9.

19. Dates Collection of Information will Begin and End – 11/2/2020 through 11/30/2020

B. STATISTICAL METHODS

1. Universe and Respondent Selection

There are two methods for participating in the survey. For the first method, survey links will be placed strategically on the irs.gov/statistics website so that users of the website can participate. There is no PII involved in soliciting these users to participate in the survey. The second method requires us sending a survey link to members of our website listserv using GovDelivery, which is a listserv service used by many Federal Agencies. People seeking regular updates regarding our website have signed up to receive emails from this listserv. Survey administrators will not have access to any email addresses to administer this survey.

2. Procedures for Collecting Information

We will use the Verint EFM Survey Tool to collect responses to the survey. A follow-up email will be sent out to all listserv subscribers near the end of the collection period.

3. Methods to Maximize Response

The questionnaire length is minimized to reduce respondent burden; purpose of the survey is clearly stated (improving our website) to hopefully increase participation. Respondents are assured anonymity of their responses.

4. Testing of Procedures

SOI has used this survey administration process for several other surveys.

5. Contacts for Statistical Aspects and Data Collection

For questions regarding the study or survey instrument design, contact:

Diane Milleville

Mathematical Statistician

Statistics of Income, IRS

Email: [email protected]

Office: 202-803-9312

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