The Trump administration is drafting plans to significantly reduce the Internal Revenue Service workforce by as much as 50% through a combination of layoffs, natural attrition, and incentivized buyouts.
This dramatic downsizing effort, part of a broader initiative to shrink the federal government, would transform an agency that currently employs approximately 90,000 workers nationwide. The administration hopes to achieve the reductions by the end of the year, the source said.
These steep cuts are expected to end its growing progress to improve customer service, modernize, and catch taxpayers not paying what they owe.
Without the beefed-up workforce thanks to the tens of billions of extra funding from the 2022 tax-and-climate law known as the Inflation Reduction Act, audits will likely take longer and phone wait times will go back up.
“These Layoffs Would Add Hundreds Of Billions or More
To Deficits And Encourage Tax Cheating, Tilting The Tax
System Further Toward The Wealthy and Business
Interests at The Expense of Everyday Americans”
Lily Batchelder, former assistant treasury secretary for tax policy and
professor at NYU Law, said in a statement.
A reduction in force of tens of thousands of employees would render the IRS “dysfunctional,”
said John Koskinen, a former IRS commissioner.
The IRS employs roughly 90,000 workers and people of color make up 56% of the IRS workforce, with women representing 65%.
The reduction goal includes:
- IRS employees who have already left or were fired, which is about 12,000 employees.
- Between 4% and 5% of the IRS’s workforce took the offer from Trump adviser Elon Musk to resign and be paid until Sept. 30, the leader of the agency’s union said earlier Tuesday. and
- About 7,400 probationary employees at the agency have been fired.
More than half of the IRS workforce is eligible to retire within six years, according to National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins in a report earlier this year. Actually, the most recent strategic operating plan, states that 63% of the current IRS workforce is eligible to retire within six years.
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Sources
Read more at: Tax Times blog
