Also in the 1980's, corporate customer service was still staffed by reasonably competent and empowered employees. So having that for comparison, the government failure modes of incompetence getting entrenched plus layered bureaucracy looked quite poor.

Now the corporate fashions have gotten rid of all the competent reps, through underpay and disciplining anybody that speaks up. And corporations have developed even more bureaucratic diffusion of responsibility than government! Add in the cherry on top of offshoring (heavy accent plus lowest-bidder voip jitter), corporate customer service has become generally terrible.

So with that backdrop, one expects that calling the government will be even worse. But what you actually find are reps that have the bandwidth to actually understand at least some of what they're talking about, as they haven't been squeezed like the corporate world has.

A dependent saves you a rather small amount of tax. By my understanding, audits are focused primarily on failure to report actual income, or claiming outsized business expense.