Werfel said that near-term hiring will focus on improving taxpayer services and on handling complex audits. — Reuters
WASHINGTON: The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) commissioner Danny Werfel says that the tax agency will need to boost its workforce to over 100,000 people over the next three years to achieve its modernisation, service and enforcement goals and additional funding will be needed to maintain that extra capacity.
Werfel told reporters on his first anniversary in the IRS top job that near-term hiring will focus on improving taxpayer services and on handling complex audits.
He added that the IRS will detail its hiring plans next month to its strategic operating plan for deploying some US$60bil in supplemental funding over a decade from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
“We’re at 90,000 now. I think to get into a right-size position over the next two to three years, we need to be above 100,000, but not that much above 100,000.”
That figure would represent a more than 20,000 full-time-equivalent staff increase over the financial year 2022 level of 79,070, which was about 9.1% below the 2013 level of 86,974, according to IRS data.
IRS employment dipped to 73,519 in 2019 after years of budget cuts, mostly passed by Republican-controlled Congresses.
The overall level of increase in IRS staffing would be far less than Republican accusations that the agency is building an “army” of 87,000 agents, many of them armed.
That figure was derived from a 2021 Treasury report that estimated gross hiring needs to overcome a wave of IRS retirements and rebuild the workforce, but it has motivated Republicans to try to claw back funding.
A top-line financial year 2024 spending agreement is set to cut the original US$80bil in funds back to US$60bil.
As congressional negotiators wrangle over another partial government shutdown deadline on Friday, in the midst of tax filing season, Werfel warned of disruptions for taxpayers receiving refunds.
He said the agency would “work within the law to keep as much open as we can, but we can’t keep everything open”.
President Joe Biden’s financial year 2025 proposed budget includes a request for an additional US$104bil in IRS funding, which Werfel said would cover later years of the 10-year budget window. — Reuters
