Economic Stimulus Payments
The Challenge
The IRS wanted to learn how taxpayers viewed the IRS’s administration of the 2007 Economic Stimulus Payments. In mid-2008, they asked Pacific Consulting Group (PCG) to conduct a quick turnaround study of individual taxpayers who were eligible to receive Economic Stimulus Payments in 2007 to understand their experiences.
PCG's Approach
PCG developed specific measures to gain feedback and taxpayer perceptions on the effectiveness of IRS communications about the stimulus payment and the actual performance of issuing the payments. To meet the timeframes and efficiency goals of the study, PCG used a combination of an online panel and a random digit dialing (RDD) telephone approach. The majority of surveys, 2,500, were conducted online to produce faster and more cost-effective results. A smaller sample of 500 surveys were conducted by telephone to validate the online responses. The online survey had a response rate of 64%, and the phone survey had a response rate of 31%. PCG’s online panel partner, Knowledge Networks (KN), administered the online panel portion of the study using their first-of-its-kind panel drawn from RDD phone samples, making it representative of the entire U.S. population. Results were further weighted to ensure representativeness for this survey. In general, there were few differences between the online and phone respondents.
Results
The survey achieved a good response rate and revealed that the IRS primarily did a good job administering the Economic Stimulus Payments from the taxpayers’ perspectives. It also identified several areas for improvement. This information will be particularly useful in improving the IRS’s administration of future stimulus packages or similar initiatives.