It's becoming difficult to find new ways of describing the weekly tax season results released by the Internal Revenue Service. For the season through March 31, results, except for the size of refunds, again remained behind the year ago season through April 1.

Several practitioner organizations and firms have recommended changes they say are necessary to improve Internal Revenue Services. The nine groups say an improved governance and oversight structure of the IRS to reverse what they say is an unacceptable level of service to consumes and preparers.

The 2017 tax season continued its pattern of reducing the gap with last year's results. And for the season through March 17, the number of returns received by the Internal Revenue Service were down 5.5 percent year ago from results through March 18, 2016. That was an improvement from the season through March 11 when returns filed were 6.8 percent from 2016 totals.