Taxpayers are likely to get their worst service from the IRS in more than a decade, a federal watchdog said Wednesday.

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Nina Olson, the national taxpayer advocate, said in her annual report that missed phone calls and unanswered letters about questions would be the biggest problem for taxpayers this year.

Olson, an in-house watchdog for the IRS, has for years warned about the agency’s declining customer service, and urged lawmakers to provide more funding boost to help stem the problem.

"We do not think it is acceptable for the government to tell millions of taxpayers who seek help each year, in essence, 'We’re sorry. You’re on your own,'" Olson's report said.

But Republicans clearly don’t agree with Olson on the agency's funding, having just pushed to cut the IRS’s budget another $346 million for this fiscal year. The IRS budget now stands at $10.9 billion, more than $1 billion less than its high water mark five years ago.

Those cuts come, Olson notes, as the IRS is taking on more and more work. The new IRS filing season, which starts next week, is the first in which the agency has to examine healthcare subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. The agency is also still implementing a major law cracking down on offshore tax cheats, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act.

John Koskinen, the IRS commissioner, told agency staffers on Tuesday that those cuts will mean fewer audits, information technology improvements and overtime pay. Koskinen also said the IRS might have to shut down the agency for two days this year, furloughing workers without pay.

Koskinen and Olson say that budget cuts have hurt taxpayers’ ability to get answers out of the IRS, with the advocates saying customer service could be the worst since 2001.

In all, the IRS gets around 100 million phone calls and 10 million letters from taxpayers each year. Olson added that nearly 200 million people in the U.S. do business with the IRS, once joint returns are taken into account — roughly three times as many as any other agency.

Olson and Koskinen have warned that fewer than half of phone calls to the agency would be answered this year, with wait times of half an hour expected to be normal.

Roughly a decade ago, the IRS answered almost nine in 10 calls, with an average wait time of under three minutes, Olson said.

Plus, during the filing season, taxpayers can only expect basic tax law questions to get answered when they reach the IRS. Outside the filing season, even those basic questions won’t get an answer.

To stem that tide, Olson has called on Congress to enact a taxpayer bill of rights that the IRS implemented administratively last year.

"Without adequate support, many taxpayers will be frustrated, some will make potentially costly mistakes, others will incur higher compliance costs when forced to seek information and assistance from tax professionals that the IRS previously provided for free, and still others will simply give up and not file returns at all," Olson said.

This post was updated at 11:07 a.m.