Those 87,000 New IRS Agents Are Not about to Break Down Your Door

We have all recently heard that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is hiring 87,000 new agents and have seen the various reactions to this news. As tax attorneys, we have received more than our fair share of ice-breaker comments on what this means for us and how busy we will be. What this doesn’t mean is that 87,000 IRS agents are going to come break down your door and force you to allocate for all of your Venmo accounts on the spot. Ordinary taxpayers have no idea what actually goes into hiring a single IRS agent, let alone 87,000 agents over multiple years to try to reduce the labor backlog.

Most people think that hiring 87,000 IRS agents is a large amount and that they will be pumping out business and individual audits at an unprecedented speed. What most people do not understand is that this 87,000 has to be spread across hundreds of IRS departments, meaning 87,000 is a small number for a federal agency that has been severely understaffed for years. It can take, on average, two years for an auditor or collection agent to be released into the wild and have taxpayer contact; most of the time, that individual will not make it through the rigorous two training program, which means that only a fraction of those 87,000 will make it to the finish line.

Regardless of the above commentary, it really will be a great move for the IRS to hire all these individuals regardless of whether they adequately plug all the staffing holes at the IRS. Further, owing to the nature of the staff shortage and the recent ramp-up of audits of top earners, this will hopefully bring some balance to the individuals and businesses flying under the radar because there is no ability for the IRS even to audit a fraction of the taxpayers in the United States. If the IRS can pull off its hiring spree, it is projected to collect an additional $10 billion or more in revenue.

The other hurdle that the IRS will face outside of employee retention is actually being able to hire that many new faces. The IRS has an intense and laborious hiring process that is neither quick nor efficient. The original bill granting the IRS the additional funds to beef up its labor force contained important language (untimely removed from the final bill) that would have allowed the IRS to fast-track the hiring process instead of relying on the current process. The IRS has 25,000 fewer employees than it did two decades ago, and not only does it need to fast-track its human resources process, but it also needs to be competitive in the pay and benefits it offers in this tight job market.

The IRS Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS) releases a yearly report on how efficient the IRS has been at handling taxpayer matters. In 2019 TAS had set a goal of filling vacant positions within 80 days, but in reality, it was taking 120 days, given that a worldwide pandemic overturned life as we know it. The IRS had planned to hire 5,500 individuals for tax year 2022, but only 3,400 were hired.

The exact outcome and impact of hiring 87,000 individuals are still unknown, and it will be interesting to see if it leads to the IRS and other government agencies realizing that they need to increase IRS hiring numbers (beyond their current employment) and overall budget to allow this federal agency to run anywhere near efficiently and effectively—not only for itself but for all U.S. taxpayers.