The Internal Revenue Service handles more than 100 million phone calls every tax season -- and, having just placed one of them, I admit I was impressed with the care and courtesy with which I was handled.

"Customers expect 24/7 customer service, and they want quick, accurate information without going through 'touch-tone hell,'" says David Madison, an information systems engineer with MITRE's Center for Enterprise Modernization, which has created a specialized research lab focused on contact center infrastructures and is working with the IRS. "Yet running call-centers is very labor-intensive, and many of them need modernization. That's not unique to the IRS, but the IRS and other government agencies do have unique challenges that differentiate them from commercial companies. For instance, the IRS's call-center work is very peak-demand oriented, specifically between January 1 and April 15 of each year. You need to build infrastructure to support that peak, but without spending so much that you have enormous excess capacity the rest of the year. Also, there are special privacy issues. Tax and social security data are very sensitive and must be secured."

Considering the massive amounts of information handled by the IRS and the sheer complexity of the US tax code, it's an extraordinary challenge. The IRS has about 10,000 customer-service representatives and each has access to different information; no one can be a specialist in every aspect of the U.S. tax code. That means the system must direct callers to the right expert.

"We also must consider the different channels for getting and receiving information, including phone—both speech and touch-tone menus—human interaction, mail, and the Internet. Providing consistency of customer service, regardless of the channel, is a clear challenge," Madison says.

Of course, we could make this whole effort a hell of a lot easier if we simply adopted the same "flat tax" that made Hong Kong such an impressive Asian power. While the folks at the IRS seemed pretty friendly, I'd prefer to do my taxes on a post-card, and place fewer calls to the government