Article Summary
The Trump administration’s plan to reduce the IRS workforce has resulted in a significant loss of tax auditors, with almost one-third leaving the agency through March 2025, according to a report from the U.S. Treasury Department’s watchdog. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has aimed to trim the federal workforce, and the IRS has been a target for cost-cutting, with plans to cut up to 40% of its workforce this year. The report shows that revenue agents, the IRS workers who perform audits, have been particularly affected, with 31% of these workers, or about 3,600 auditors, taking the deferred resignation plan or being fired in the first three months of 2025.
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The Trump administration’s plan to trim the IRS workforce has resulted in almost one-third of its tax auditors leaving the agency through March, according to a report from the U.S. Treasury Department’s watchdog.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has sought to trim the federal workforce through a combination of layoffs and so-called deferred resignation. Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla, said on the electric vehicle maker’s April 22 earnings call that DOGE’s efforts “in addressing waste and fraud” will “get the country back on track.”
The IRS has been a focus of DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts, with plans to trim as much as 40% of its workforce this year. Through March, those efforts have resulted in the tax agency losing about 11% of its workforce, the May 2 report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) found.
But revenue agents — the IRS workers who perform audits — have seen a much bigger hit, with 31% of those workers, or about 3,600 auditors, taking either the deferred resignation plan or getting fired in the first three months of 2025, the report found. Losing a large share of auditors could impact the federal government’s ability to collect tax revenue, given that these agents typically handle cases involving wealthy taxpayers or corporations, experts say.
“You lose the very staff trained to keep high-end taxpayers and corporate tax payers in compliance,” noted Emily DiVito, senior adviser on economic policy at the left-leaning Groundwork Collaborative and a former policy adviser at the U.S. Treasury Department, which oversees the IRS.
She added, “You can see some behavioral effects when taxpayers, especially those that really don’t want to pay their bills, come to accept there is very little risk to not paying at all, or even filing.”
Reached for comment, a Treasury spokeswoman said, “The Biden Administration grew the IRS from 79,431 to 102,309 personnel. Under new leadership, approximately the same number of employees have left the IRS, with a vast majority leaving voluntarily through the Deferred Resignation Program. The roll back of wasteful Biden-era hiring surges, and consolidation of critical support functions are vital to improve both efficiency and quality of service. The Secretary is committed to ensuring that efficiency is realized while providing the collections, privacy, and customer service the American people deserve.”
The White House didn’t immediately return a request for comment about the TIGTA report.
While the TIGTA report didn’t explain why auditor departures outpaced that of overall cuts at the IRS, the tax agency had made an effort under the Biden administration to hire more auditors in order to beef up revenue collection. In February 2024, the IRS had said it expected to collect hundreds of billions in additional taxes after using funding from the Inflation Reduction Act to hire more auditors.
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