Many Customers, Two Ledgers, One Voice: An Omnichannel hypothesis for Social Security and the IRS

 

What if Frank Bisignano does not think he has two jobs? What if he only sees one Government, one Front Door, one common contact-center architecture? In the next 4 years, could one phone number handle both agencies? Will IRS employees be answering SSA questions, or vice versa?  

These questions may offer a better explanation for the unusual decision to place one executive over both the Social Security Administration and the day-to-day operations of the Internal Revenue Service than a traditional federal organizational chart. From Washington, SSA and the IRS appear fundamentally different: one administers retirement, disability, survivors, and Supplemental Security Income programs, while the other administers the federal tax system. Each operates under its own statutes, appropriations, workforce, technology, field structure, culture, and congressional oversight.

Look at the two agencies through the eyes of a career banking and payments executive, , and a different picture starts to emerge.

The IRS handles an enormous amount of money coming into the federal government. SSA handles an enormous amount of money going back out to individuals. The IRS says it collected approximately $5.1 trillion in fiscal year 2024. SSA says it sends approximately 75 million payments each month and about $1.6 trillion annually. Those figures do not make the agencies opposite sides of the same accounting ledger in a literal sense. Social Security's retirement and disability programs operate through dedicated trust funds, SSI comes from general revenues, and Treasury performs important cash-management functions between collection and payment. But from the perspective of financial operations, the analogy becomes interesting: one organization manages a massive inflow relationship with Americans while another manages a massive outflow relationship.

A Banker Arrives in Government

Bisignano does not come to government through tax administration or Social Security policy. His résumé runs through some of the largest financial-services organizations in the country. His positions include senior roles at Citigroup, co-Chief Operating Officer of JPMorgan Chase, CEO of JPMorgan's Mortgage Banking business, chairman and CEO of First Data, and chairman and CEO of Fiserv. SSA says that during his tenure at Fiserv the company processes more than 850 million transactions per day, totaling more than $2.5 trillion, and handles more than 400 million telephone calls annually.

Executives bring mental models with them. A career tax administrator naturally sees returns, examinations, collections, taxpayer assistance, and enforcement. A career Social Security executive sees earnings records, claims, adjudications, post-entitlement actions, disability determinations, and payments. A payments executive tends to see transactions, customers, identity, routing, risk, controls, channels, service levels, processing costs, and exceptions.

That does not prove Bisignano views Social Security benefits as "withdrawals" and tax collections as "deposits." There is no public statement from him using that formulation. It does, however, provide a useful hypothesis for interpreting several decisions that otherwise look unusual.

The strongest evidence came on October 6, 2025, when the Treasury Department created the position of IRS chief executive officer and appointed Bisignano to it while he continued serving as commissioner of Social Security. Treasury did not argue that Social Security and tax law are similar. Instead, Secretary Scott Bessent emphasized the agencies’ shared “technological and customer service goals.” In the new role, Bisignano assumed responsibility for managing the IRS and overseeing its day-to-day operations while retaining his SSA commissionership.

Words matter. From Bessent’s perspective, and given Bisignano’s background, technology and customer service are precisely where the two organizations begin to look alike.

Then Matt Zames Arrives

Another piece of the puzzle appears in August 2026. Multiple reports say former JPMorgan Chase executive Matt Zames joins SSA in an unpaid advisory position focused on modernization. Zames and Bisignano are not strangers brought together by government. They have a strong relationship, serving together as senior operating executives at JPMorgan. Reporting on the appointment describes Zames as a former JPMorgan chief operating officer who led major technology and cost-reduction initiatives.

Again, the appointment does not prove a plan to combine SSA and IRS operations. The reported assignment focuses on SSA modernization. But it strengthens the idea that Bisignano approaches the federal problem with a familiar operating model and people who understand that model.

Taken together, these developments need closer examination. One former JPMorgan operating executive now oversees operations at both SSA and the IRS, while another has arrived to advise SSA on modernization. Meanwhile, both agencies increasingly describe their futures in terms familiar to large financial institutions: digital-first and omnichannel service, automation, customer experience, operational efficiency, stronger controls, modernized technology, and measurable service levels.

Deposits and Withdrawals

Consider the federal government from the customer's perspective rather than the agency's perspective.

A worker earns wages. An employer reports those wages. Payroll taxes move to the federal government. Wage information enters government systems. The worker files a tax return with the IRS. Years later, the same person's earnings history helps determine a Social Security benefit. The person may receive a tax refund from Treasury, a monthly retirement payment through Social Security, or both.

Government divides these interactions among organizations because statutes and administrative history create those organizations. The person standing on the other side of the counter remains the same person.

Banks learned this lesson long ago. They do not ordinarily create one customer-service company for deposits, another customer-service company for withdrawals, another for transfers, and another for statements. They create common customer infrastructure and then route specialized work behind it. The checking-account specialist and mortgage underwriter may require different knowledge and different permissions, but the institution does not need to duplicate every piece of technology surrounding them.

This framework helps clarify what an SSA-IRS integration could involve.

It does not require abolishing either agency. It does not require combining their statutes. It does not even require teaching an SSA claims specialist how to interpret the Internal Revenue Code or teaching an IRS representative how to adjudicate disability.

It could involve building a common operating layer around both.

One Front Door, Specialized Work Behind It

Imagine a person contacting the federal government because a financial event does not look right. Today, the person has to know which agency owns the problem before government even starts solving it. A missing W-2 may implicate both SSA's earnings record and IRS tax administration. A name or Social Security number mismatch may affect both. Death information, wages, self-employment income, addresses, identity verification, bank information, and other records can have consequences across multiple programs.

A financial-services model starts somewhere else. It identifies the person first, identifies the transaction second, determines the responsible business unit third, and routes the customer accordingly.

Under that model, SSA and IRS do not necessarily share the same substantive employees. They could share pieces of the infrastructure surrounding those employees.

A common contact-center architecture could provide telephony, interactive voice response, callbacks, authentication, workforce-management software, contact histories, customer relationship management, routing, analytics, quality systems, language services, fraud detection, artificial intelligence assistance, and basic self-service. Once the customer's intent becomes clear, the system routes the transaction to an IRS-trained employee, an SSA-trained employee, or a specialized automated service.

The model becomes:

Customer → Identity → Intent → Routing → Specialized Service → Resolution.

That is very different from:

Customer → Agency → Telephone Number → Queue → Employee → Possible Transfer to Another Agency.

The first model organizes government around the customer. The second organizes the customer around government.

Both Agencies Are Moving Toward That Model

Bisignano already uses strikingly similar language at the two agencies.

At SSA, his June 2025 congressional testimony describes a future in which someone receives dependable service whether that person visits an office, calls the National 800 Number, or handles the transaction on a smartphone. He describes the goal as a modern "omni-channel" experience. SSA now emphasizes expanded online transactions, IVR, callbacks, telephone modernization, and straight-through processing.

At the IRS, Bisignano describes a "Digital IRS" and a seamless experience comparable to private-sector service. His 2026 testimony says approximately 16,000 customer-service representatives work across phones, correspondence, and web chat. Rather than treating telephone answering as an isolated mission, IRS management schedules those employees across channels according to workload. The agency is also replacing its old telephone Level of Service measure with broader enterprise service measurements that include representatives, web chat, and automated channels.

The IRS takes another visible step on September 25, 2026, when it launches a new mobile app. Bisignano describes the goal as making IRS services easier to access and more consistent across platforms. That is nearly the same service philosophy he articulates at SSA: meet people where they choose to interact rather than force them into a particular delivery channel.

This does not establish a joint SSA-IRS customer-service organization. It does establish that the same executive now applies similar operating principles to both organizations.

The Agencies Already Share More Than Most People Realize

SSA and IRS are not strangers operationally.

The agencies have long exchanged wage information. Under the Combined Annual Wage Reporting program, employers send wage reports to SSA, SSA processes the information for Social Security earnings records, and information moves between SSA and IRS for tax and wage-reporting purposes. Current SSA guidance describes formal interagency agreements governing these exchanges.

Their physical service networks also overlap. The current Internal Revenue Manual identifies six IRS Taxpayer Assistance Centers temporarily operating inside SSA offices, including locations in Maine, Connecticut, Virginia, Nebraska, Ohio, and Illinois. Customers at these locations go through processes designed specifically for an IRS operation housed within an SSA facility.

This is not entirely new. The agencies experiment with co-location and shared access years before Bisignano. A Taxpayer Advocate report on an earlier IRS-SSA co-location pilot reports very high customer satisfaction at the participating sites. SSA also previously places IRS online-service access on self-help computers in selected Social Security offices as part of a "one-government" approach.

The lesson is important. Congress does not need to merge the agencies before they can share facilities, technology, or parts of a customer experience. They already have precedents for doing exactly that.

Identity May Be the Most Important Common Layer

The most valuable shared capability may not be the telephone system. It may be identity.

Both agencies have to answer the same fundamental question before conducting sensitive business: Are you really who you say you are?

SSA now allows customers to enter my Social Security through Login.gov or ID.me. The agency explicitly describes these as identity-verification and secure sign-in services that can support access to multiple government services. IRS also uses ID.me for access to individual online tax information and a growing set of digital services.

That means part of the common front door already exists.

From a transaction-management perspective, identity becomes the logical beginning of the customer journey. Once government establishes identity at an appropriate assurance level, the next questions become what the customer wants, what authority permits government to disclose, what system owns the authoritative information, and what specialist possesses the authority to act.

That is much closer to modern banking architecture than to the traditional model of separate agency telephone numbers connected to separate legacy applications.

But the Call-Center Math Is Not as Simple as It First Appears

There is an appealing workforce argument for sharing people between the agencies. IRS experiences its enormous filing-season surge early in the calendar year. One might imagine shifting unused SSA capacity toward IRS during tax season and moving it back afterward.

The actual workload patterns complicate that theory.

IRS demand is heavily seasonal. Its filing season concentrates enormous volumes of returns and customer contacts in the first part of the year. SSA telephone traffic is much less seasonal. A Taxpayer Advocate Service comparison using fiscal year 2023 data says SSA receives roughly the same number of calls each month while IRS receives much more of its telephone demand during and shortly after filing season. The same report says SSA receives almost 52 million calls during FY 2023.

Older SSA Inspector General data shows another wrinkle. SSA historically experiences elevated National 800 Number volume from October through February, with January often its busiest calling month because of Medicare premium questions and retirement applications.

The strongest case for combining operations is not based on the assumption that IRS demand peaks when SSA has spare capacity. In reality, both agencies can experience heavy demand at the same time.

The stronger argument involves scale and infrastructure.

If two enormous organizations separately buy and maintain telephone platforms, callback systems, analytics systems, workforce-management tools, contact-center engineering teams, quality systems, AI tools, and customer-service technology, some duplication becomes inevitable. A shared technical platform can create economies of scale even when the substantive employees remain separate.

It can also create flexibility at the edges. Employees might handle carefully defined low-complexity transactions across organizations after appropriate training while specialists retain complex program work. Common authentication, routing, general information, appointment scheduling, document intake, status inquiries, and digital assistance present very different training problems from adjudicating a disability claim or resolving a complicated tax account.

That is where the banking analogy becomes more plausible.

There Is a Major Legal Wall

The analogy also has limits.

IRS information is not simply government information available to any federal employee who needs it. Internal Revenue Code Section 6103 establishes a broad rule that tax returns and return information remain confidential unless the law specifically authorizes disclosure. The statute includes defined provisions allowing certain tax information to move to SSA for administration of the Social Security Act, but those provisions demonstrate the rule rather than eliminate it. Congress specifies what information can move, why it can move, and under what authority.

That means a universal federal customer-service representative with unrestricted access to both SSA and IRS records would present serious legal and security issues.

A common service platform does not require unrestricted common access.

Banks solve similar problems through role-based access. An employee may use the same customer-service environment as another worker without having permission to see the same accounts or execute the same transactions. Government could theoretically use the same principle. The customer enters through a common layer, while authorization controls determine which data and functions become visible after routing.

The result looks less like merging databases and more like placing carefully controlled doors between rooms that already exist.

The Human Expertise Still Matters

Another danger comes from assuming that customer-service work becomes interchangeable simply because the technology becomes common. It does not.

Social Security employees develop deep knowledge of retirement entitlement, disability, SSI, representative payees, overpayments, earnings records, Medicare interactions, work incentives, and hundreds of other program rules. IRS representatives operate within a different body of law involving filing requirements, credits, withholding, payments, collections, refunds, account adjustments, and taxpayer rights. Those skills take time to develop. A common telephone switch does not create a common profession.

A poorly designed consolidation could therefore save money on infrastructure while losing money through incorrect answers, repeat contacts, rework, improper payments, tax errors, or longer resolution times. The central design question cannot be how many employees government can make interchangeable. It has to be which functions genuinely become better when shared and which require specialization.

The same caution applies to digital service. SSA's population includes older people, individuals with disabilities, people with limited English proficiency, people without reliable internet access, and people dealing with major life disruptions. Bisignano himself says SSA's approach is "digital-first" rather than "digital-only." A common service model succeeds only if it improves access across channels rather than using technology merely to push people away from human assistance.

What a Real Integration Might Look Like

The most plausible future is therefore not one giant SSA-IRS call center.

It is a common government customer-service operating layer with legally and professionally separate businesses behind it.

A customer could begin with a shared identity service. A common digital or telephone layer could determine the reason for contact. The system could resolve simple self-service transactions automatically. It could route tax matters to an IRS queue and Social Security matters to an SSA queue. Employees could use common telephony, scheduling, callback, workforce-management, quality, analytics, and AI-assistance technologies while their permissions continue to restrict them to authorized systems and records.

Physical locations could follow the same architecture. A federal service center does not necessarily require one employee to know every program. It can provide a common reception and authentication function, self-service technology, scheduled access to specialized representatives, and remote connections to experts elsewhere.

Government starts to look less like a collection of storefronts and more like a network.

What Would Confirm the Hypothesis?

The public record does not yet establish that Bisignano intends to combine SSA and IRS call-center staffs. I have not found a public SSA, IRS, or Treasury announcement describing such a merger. The hypothesis becomes testable, however, because an operating-model transformation leaves evidence.

Watch the technology contracts. ITSSC III.

If the same contact-center platforms, customer relationship systems, callback technology, AI assistance, workforce-management products, identity systems, or analytics platforms begin appearing at both organizations, that would suggest convergence below the organizational chart.

Watch the organization charts.

If customer-service technology, digital services, identity management, data services, or contact-center engineering increasingly consolidate into common enterprise organizations, that matters more than whether the sign on the building still says IRS or Social Security.

Watch the performance measures.

The IRS already moves away from a telephone-only Level of Service measure toward enterprise customer-service measures. SSA increasingly describes service across web, phone, and field offices as a single experience. If both agencies begin using the same definitions of abandonment, speed of answer, first-contact resolution, digital completion, customer effort, and transaction cost, that would create the management language necessary for a common operating model.

Watch co-location.

The IRS already operates Taxpayer Assistance Centers inside several SSA offices. Expansion of that model would offer one of the clearest physical manifestations of the idea.

Watch Matt Zames.

His presence matters because he comes from the same operating environment as Bisignano and reportedly arrives specifically to work on modernization. If modernization increasingly focuses on platforms, transactions, shared services, customer journeys, controls, and enterprise technology rather than simply replacing individual SSA systems, the banking analogy gains additional support.

One Government, Not One Agency

The most interesting possibility is not that Bisignano wants to eliminate SSA or IRS. Nothing in the public record reviewed here establishes that. The more plausible hypothesis is subtler. He may see the federal organizational chart as less important than the customer journey.

A taxpayer and a Social Security beneficiary are often the same person at different points in the same financial life. Government asks that person to establish identity repeatedly, navigate different organizations, understand which bureaucracy owns a transaction, use different service channels, and tolerate transfers among systems that already exchange substantial amounts of information.

A career federal executive can look at that arrangement and see agencies. A career banking and payments executive can look at it and see a fragmented customer platform.

That difference in perspective may help explain why Treasury believes the same executive can run day-to-day IRS operations while simultaneously running Social Security. Treasury itself points to common technology and customer-service goals. Bisignano brings decades of experience in banking, transaction processing, payments, customer operations, and large-scale technology. A former JPMorgan operating colleague now reportedly advises him at SSA. Both SSA and IRS increasingly adopt digital-first, omnichannel service strategies. The agencies already exchange information, share some identity infrastructure, and even operate some IRS offices inside SSA locations.

Seen from that perspective, "IRS takes deposits and SSA makes withdrawals" is not a literal description of federal finance. It is a management metaphor. And it leads to a much larger question. Maybe the experiment is not whether one man can run two agencies. Maybe the experiment is whether two agencies serving the same public can begin operating as parts of one government.

References

Internal Revenue Service. “CEO Frank Bisignano.” Current IRS biography and description of the CEO role.

Internal Revenue Service. “Written Testimony of the Honorable Frank J. Bisignano, Chief Executive Officer, Internal Revenue Service, Before the Senate Finance Committee: 2026 Tax Filing Season and IRS Operations.” 2026.

Internal Revenue Service. “IRS Launches New Mobile App, Expanding Digital Services for Taxpayers.” September 25, 2026.

Social Security Administration. “Commissioner.” Current biography of Frank J. Bisignano.

Social Security Administration. “A Historic Year: Commissioner Bisignano Delivers a Stronger Social Security.” May 7, 2026.

Social Security Administration. “Social Security Administration Delivers Best Performance in History.” June 29, 2026.

U.S. Department of the Treasury. “Treasury Department Announces Frank Bisignano as Chief Executive Officer of the IRS.” October 6, 2025.

U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means. Written testimony of Commissioner Frank J. Bisignano regarding Social Security operations and omnichannel service. June 25, 2025.

Internal Revenue Service. Internal Revenue Manual, Field Assistance. Current guidance concerning IRS Taxpayer Assistance Centers co-located in SSA offices.

Taxpayer Advocate Service. Telephone service research comparing IRS and SSA contact patterns.

Social Security Administration, Office of Inspector General. “The Social Security Administration’s Telephone Service Performance.” Includes historical monthly calling patterns and January peak-volume analysis.

Social Security Administration. Program Operations Manual System, “The Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration’s Memorandum of Understanding for the Combined Annual Wage Reporting Program.” Updated September 2025.

U.S. House of Representatives, Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 U.S.C. § 6103, “Confidentiality and Disclosure of Returns and Return Information.” Current through September 27, 2026.

Social Security Administration. “Creating an Account, my Social Security.” Current identity verification and sign-in guidance concerning Login.gov and ID.me.

Internal Revenue Service. “Creating an Account for IRS.gov.” Current guidance on ID.me identity verification for IRS services.

Quartz and PYMNTS, reporting on Matt Zames joining SSA as an unpaid modernization adviser, August 21, 2026.