IRS Loses 40% of IT Staff, 80% of Tech Leaders In 'Efficiency' Shakeup (theregister.com) 87
The IRS's IT division has reportedly lost 40% of its staff and nearly 80% of its tech leadership amid a federal "efficiency" overhaul, the agency's CIO revealed yesterday. The Register reports: Kaschit Pandya detailed the extent of the tech reorganization during a panel at the Association of Government Accountants yesterday, describing it as the biggest in two decades. ... The IRS lost a quarter of its workforce overall in 2025. But the tech team was clearly affected more deeply. At the start of the year, the team encompassed around 8,500 employees.
As reported by Federal News Network (FNN), Pandya said: "Last year, we lost approximately 40 percent of the IT staff and nearly 80 percent of the execs." "So clearly there was an opportunity, and I thought the opportunity that we needed to really execute was reorganizing." That included breaking up silos within the organization, he said. "Everyone was operating in their own department or area."
It is not entirely clear where all those staff have gone. According to a report by the US Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the IT department had 8,504 workers as of October 2024. As of October 2025, it had 7,135. However, reports say that as part of the reorganization, 1,000 techies were detailed to work on delivering frontline services during the US tax season. According to FNN, those employees have questioned the wisdom of this move and its implementation.
As reported by Federal News Network (FNN), Pandya said: "Last year, we lost approximately 40 percent of the IT staff and nearly 80 percent of the execs." "So clearly there was an opportunity, and I thought the opportunity that we needed to really execute was reorganizing." That included breaking up silos within the organization, he said. "Everyone was operating in their own department or area."
It is not entirely clear where all those staff have gone. According to a report by the US Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the IT department had 8,504 workers as of October 2024. As of October 2025, it had 7,135. However, reports say that as part of the reorganization, 1,000 techies were detailed to work on delivering frontline services during the US tax season. According to FNN, those employees have questioned the wisdom of this move and its implementation.
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Have you ever heard of 'representation'? Do you know what that part of the message is about?
The alternative is... you know what... don't worry about it. It's not like you're ever going to see a vertical slice and understand where you are in it.
Re:Fuck Taxes. (Score:4)
And so, my fellow Billionaires: ask not what this country can do for you--ask what YOUR country can do for you.
Ad Hominem (Score:2)
Am I? I mean I have a Marx beard, but I also have a stock portfolio so I think at best I'm a hypocrite and class traitor.
And claiming that my statements are false because of your assumption of my political idealogy is a fallacy known as Ad Hominem. You appear to not want to engage in an earnest discussion but you also were unable to just leave things be. How sad for you
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If it's free, you're the product.
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'Penny wise and pound foolish' mentality.
Lost? Really? (Score:2)
"It is not entirely clear where all those staff have gone."
Well, somebodyknows where they went. Ask elno
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Re: Fuck Taxes. (Score:1)
So just fuck the welfare of the American people, huh?
The welfare of the American people depends on a fully-staffed IT department at the IRS?
Maybe shift the tax burden back to billionaires and corporations where it properly belongs
Half of the U.S. population pays no net income taxes, that mean after adding up all the taxes withheld from their paychecks and all their deductions they actually either pay no net taxes or actually profit off the income tax system (get more as a refund than they paid in that year)...
What's their fair share? Zero? Less than zero?
instead of onto sales taxes, turnpike and transit fares, and use fees for parks.
Those are all 'consumption taxes' taxes paid for something one consumes (buying something, dri
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How about we throw *YOU* in the harbor, scumbag?
But no, I think you should hit a pothole on the Interstate which wasn't repaired because STOOOPID SHITS like you didn't pay taxes, and your car flips.
Re:surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
The IRS runs heavily on ancient technology. I wish it were better, but moving people who know how those ancient systems work is asking for trouble.
But with this group, that might be the point. Make the IRS dysfunctional so it can be scaled back, or at least so that they're spending so much time cleaning up messes that they're not doing audits of the most complex taxpayers.
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Re:surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
That may indeed be the point. I think P.J. O'Rourke put it well:
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.
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Ancient doesn't always mean bad. The mainframe code running in banks today is decades old. A new million dollar machine from IBM will run those 70s era binaries natively.
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"No reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons" -- Ronald Reagan, 1967
Ah the Mulford Act. NRA and Republicans suddenly wanted gun control when Black Panthers were showing up to protests armed.
Re: surprised? (Score:1)
Just to be clear, you think there IS a good reason for a person to be walking around with a loaded weapon? Or are you making fun of Reagan for once sharing your opinion?
And BTW, what does this have to do with the staffing levels at the IRS?
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FWIW Reagan was wrong.
As long as SOMEBODY could be carrying a loaded weapon then there's a fucking good reason to also be allowed to carry one, because the state/police literally can't protect you from every possibility, despite what they would like you to believe.
As a Brit that can remember when the UK introduced very strict gun laws, I can tell you that the only people not carrying guns now are all the law abiding citizens. The bad guys still carry guns. Aart from leaving innocent people defenseless, all
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The ancient mainframe code is also holding back improvements. Banks in other countries that got a much later start on computerizing everything have much more advanced methods of moving money around for the average person. I still have to write 2-3 checks every year for places that make it extra difficult to use credit cards. I have to pay "convenience fees" to send money via ACH for property taxes and a few other things. Adding a PIN to debit and credit cards was a massive lift for US banks because old code
Re:surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to pay for the cost of upgradaing at some point, but cmon US, this is your tax base you're talking about. Outside of *where* that money goes (it's impressive a country is so full of people who think too much goes to the military but yet so much goes to the military) why would you want to kneecap revenue collection? I'm consistently impressed by how the US raises so many adults who think their country would be better with a government that had no money to do anything. No welfare, no health care, all infrastructure private, etc .. the mentality is bananas, almost *because* of how obvious it is to land there.
Re:surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
Newt Gingrich's moment of brilliance was when he realized that he didn't have to get rid of government regulators, just separate their enforcement division into a separate line item and squeeze. And squeeze they have, the IRS, EPA, FAA, FCC, CPD, etc. enforcement divisions are all skeletons of their former selves. As neo-con 'thought leader' Grover Norquist told a group of conservative lawmakers in the '90s, "You'll never convince voters that government is broken if you don't break it first."
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beauty
Re: surprised? (Score:1)
And Biden hired 83,000 IRS employees to audit ONLY millionaires and billionaires, right?
We literally know nothing about any of the IT workers that left the IRS - they could have gone on to contractor positions back at the IRS, they could have been dead wood that did almost nothing, or they could have been the very bestest COBOL batch programmers ever, who can read raw EBCIDC like it was plain text...
There were/are countless thousands of federal workers that couldn't even be bothered to log into their work l
Because it's the wealthy grifting as usual (Score:1)
Cutting the IRS staff means the system grinds to a halt preventing auditing of the wealthy and payback for the rest. It's nothing new, it's just more nakedly self-dealing than before. The current administration is the most corrupt in American history by a wide margin. They're also embarrassingly stupid, but as long as they line their own pockets, they really don't give a damn about the damage they cause everyone else.
Re: Because it's the wealthy grifting as usual (Score:1)
IT workers aren't auditors, and auditors aren't IT workers, two wildly different skill sets.
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I totally agree. I mean I'm amazed that while DOGE was there, Musk didn't also use the opportunity to totally replace their ancient system.
Not least because access and control of that data would have put him in an incredibly powerful political position.
Re: surprised? (Score:2)
But I thought ai was perfect for this! Isn't musk an AI master?
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Naw, because not even SpaceX IT staff could understand the convoluted, spaghetti-coded COBOL that is the US Tax System.
Then we take the opportunity to throw out the existing tax code, recreate it to be simpler and therefore it can be coded in new software. Maybe something like a flat tax with deductions for dependents and that's about it for individuals. For the corporate world, something along the same lines -and- without all of the loopholes and exemptions. Oh, and the social security and medicare/medicaid monies go into to separate fund that can't be raided, and the limit on those taxes (presently at $184.5K) are remove
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Social Security and Medicare monies already have their own trust funds that cannot be directly taken. The money is sent to the Treasury in return for special bonds available only to those programs, boosting the sizes of the trust funds over time. If it just sat there, they would be in even worse trouble than they already are. Also, there is no income cap on the Medicare tax.
I'm all for removing the cap on wages taxed for Social Security, though.
Re: surprised? (Score:1)
We have an ancient code base for the IRS for the same reason the FBI still has an ancient IT infrastructure and the Air Traffic Controllers are relying on vacuum tube mainframes - the government SUCKS at large-scale system upgrades/rewrites.
Re:surprised? (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.politico.com/story... [politico.com]
https://spectrum.ieee.org/irs-... [ieee.org]
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Please read what I said right at the beginning of my post that you responded to. Also those links are from 2018.
Re:surprised? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't want to comment on exactly what got cut or how, but it's not a surprise to me that an evaluation of a government department would find significant numbers of positions/employees that don't add enough value to justify staying employed. Actually I'm just surprised it's as low as about 20%.
You do know that the DOGE cuts didn't even look at what the cut employees did or whether they "added value." The cuts were done with a chainsaw,
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/1... [nytimes.com]
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Lol this stupid administration was like "here's some money to make cheese, that'll make us look good people want cheese" .. and DOGE was like "here's some cheese, trust us it's cheese" and they drop a fucking block of cement on the desk. Just back scratching all the way around.
Ad hominem (Score:2)
This is what is known as Ad hominem [wikipedia.org]. Where instead of attacking the opposing argument you attack the speaker instead.
I'm not sure if this was an error on your part. Or that you do not genuinely want to engage in a reasonable discussion, and simply push your own specific bias into an discussion you are otherwise not willing to be involved in.
"A strange game. The only way to win is not to play." -- WOPR
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I did not attack the speaker at all. I simply stated a fact that I really do not waste my time reading such biassed sources as the NYTimes and even provided a link to a credible source to back up my claim that they are indeed extremely biassed.
Yet here you come accusing me of an ad hominem attack in a VERY patronising way. Are you even capable of considering that it's actually you that made the only ad hominem attack?
Re: surprised? (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s weird, there is a MAJOR tax scam going on involving filing millions of returns early/fraudulently using small local banks with weak security⦠stolen identities.
The IRS is the only agency with funding able to figure out how to fix it. States are dead in the water⦠returns filled out obviously using a bot with random info, actually making it much harder to detect them, oddly.
There are all kinds of things going on out there that are not getting reported in mainstream media.
Re: surprised? (Score:1)
Here's a mental exercise for you:
Imagine the IRS had a mechanism that was able to root out and deny fraudulent tax returns BUT it had a 0.01% error rate, meaning one out of every 10,000 returns would be erroneously rejected. Now, imagine a return filled out by poor people, people of color, or women were statistically more likely to be in that wrongly-rejected group of returns.
Would elected officials understand that's a cost of doing this type of work, or would they publicly rail about the racist IRS?
Politic
Re:Some of Us... (Score:4, Informative)
A national sales tax sounds simple in theory. But in reality, it doesn't matter what you tax--income, spending, property--the rich still find ways to get around taxes they don't want to pay. They just have to use different techniques. And the government can't resist making carve-outs for things they favor.
If you've ever run a business that sells things nationwide, you know that calculating sales taxes due is a *HUGE* headache. Even a zip code lookup table is not sophisticated enough. Cities have their own rates, counties, school districts, you name it. And they all have things that are exempt, or partially exempt, or exempt on specific days of the year.
The push to move from income tax to sales tax is kind of like how many developers want to "rewrite the code" to fix all the bugs. When they do rewrite the code, they find out that the problems were much more complicated and ingrained than they thought, and the project almost always gets stuck. Revamping the tax system would be nearly impossible, for all the same reasons.
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True, the tax system is very complicated. The only real fix would be to toss out the tax code wholesale and start over with something very simple, and then write the code to support that. We'd have a simple tax system that treats everyone equally; so no loopholes, exemptions, carve-outs, whatever. I could go on and attempt to design the basics of a tax code that's actually fair and does what the country needs to stay solvent, but we all know that'd be wasted of time as Congress would never do it because it
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I think you underestimate the power of lobbying. Something like this was tried in the Tax Reform Act of 1986. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] It's goal was to simplify the tax code and eliminate entire categories of loopholes. But as you can see now, all those loopholes, and more, have come back. Legislators can't keep their fingers off the law, they DO NOT CARE about the purity of the law, but they do care about campaign contributions and about the votes of their own constituents. These concerns always l
Re: Some of Us... (Score:1)
We'd have a simple tax system that treats everyone equally; so no loopholes, exemptions, carve-outs, whatever.
So businesses could no longer deduct losses or investments in research? Families couldn't deduct home mortgage interest, medical expenses, stock market losses, etc?
Really? Tell me how you'll get that approved by elected politicians?
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I posit you have mental problems.
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A consumption tax would eliminate much of the IRS. Nine states already have no income tax, and they function fine.
Upsides
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Consumption taxes have many of the same problems as an income tax: Definitions. In this case, what is consumption? If a small business owner buys a truck that is used for both business and personal needs, define how much tax they should pay for both the truck and the gasoline. Those kind of definitional problems crop up in any modern tax system and it isn't long before the system gets gamed and you need forms and audits to ensure the rules are really followed.
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Not a tax lawyer, but small businesses are usually sole proprietorships, which means the business is the person. With income taxes gone, the need to track business expenses for tax write-offs goes away too... the full tax is paid out of whatever account the small business owner decides to use to pay for the truck a the time of sale.
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If they buy the truck out of the business account but also use it for grocery runs, that part of the purchase used for grocery runs is a consumption purchase that should be taxed as consumption. The part of the purchase used for the business is an investment and not consumption. That is where things get hairy. You don't want to discourage investing in new plants and equipment by raising the cost of such purchases. But tracking consumption vs investment requires careful definitions and paperwork to match.
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"What do you do for income spent on goods outside the US? "
The tax is owed. Responsibility for paying it lies with the purchaser. Enforcement would be done by customs in most cases.
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"A consumption tax would eliminate much of the IRS. "
By the FairTax law, 100%.
"A pure consumption tax is regressive"
The FairTax is not a pure consumption tax.
"Income-tax regressivity is fixed by exempting the first ~$25,000 or so of income."
The payroll tax component of the income tax is probably the most regressive tax on the planet, and would be eliminated by the FairTax, as would Capital Gains, Corporate, individual, alternative minimum, self employment, gift, estate, etc.
Re: Some of Us... (Score:1)
Income-tax regressivity is fixed by exempting the first ~$25,000 or so of income. A consumption tax can be fixed the same way: Send every U.S. citizen a monthly prebate (e.g., ~$200 per person, a rough estimate) to offset sales taxes paid on essentials up to the poverty line. This makes the effective tax progressive for low earners while keeping it simple.
No, you're trying too hard. You exempt staples from sales tax, more broadly and generally than under current sales tax schemes.
For example, all unprepared food items are tax exempt, period. If you buy a rotisserie chicken or a prepared entree at the grocery store, maybe there's a tax, but not on uncooked chickens, etc. clothing, toiletries, and medical items are also tax exempt. Maybe clothes, up to a per-item limit, say, $100 per item with items under that amount tax-exempt, above that limit there's a tax
Kind of like working for a PE company (Score:2)
"We don't need all those people, we can save money by slashing and burning!"
Then a few months later...
"Oops, we have to start hiring, nobody that's left knows how to get things done!"
Of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Those rich folks paid good money to have the IRS kneecapped.
Seriously... "where did they go?" (Score:4, Insightful)
They were largely terminated by the much less-cool real world version of Chainsaw Man during the first six months of the current US administration.
Simple solution (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re: Simple solution (Score:1)
Changes to the tax code means changing the out-dated COBOL systems that process the returns. It really isn't as trivial as you might guess.
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Paper trails! You audit later and nail people afterwards; when you put up protective BS then people bitch about red tape etc. In emergencies, you get lax but keep receipts. Even when well run, this is how it's done.
Unlike many other states, MN has an ELECTED state auditor!
Here in MN, we investigated fraud and found plenty of exploiters. The top one in the recent scandal being a white lady...already jailed. Other states quite likely had just as much fraud but they weren't taking receipts or auditing and once
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And I'm sure once this dies down anyone who does end up in jail will be pardoned by soon to be Gov Klobuchar.
And the gravy train will roll on!
Re: Funny "Association of Government Accountants" (Score:1)
To be clear, you contend that MN is on the forefront of fighting waste, fraud, and abuse? Really?
Somehow the fraudsters in MN were able to bilk the federal gov't for literal billions of dollars for a number of years and only recently started prosecuting the offenders, and that somehow proves MN is on top of things?
Also, I notice you only mention one convicted fraudster, a white woman. Of the 80+ convictions secured already, wasn't there only ONE white person convicted? It's just a coincidence all the rest w
This has nothing to do with efficiency (Score:2)
Meanwhile to pay for those billionaire tax cuts Trump will keep raising tariffs which you pay. I can't be the only one who has noticed how expensive coffee has gotten.
Actually right for once but its corporate tax prep (Score:2)
IRS Self Serve (Score:2)
IRS self serve [irs.gov]. Note this is not the same as the free file option for those with AGI LT $89,000. Took me an hour to fill out 11 PDF online forms (1040, 5x W-2s, Schedule 1, Schedule 1-A, 8812, 2x 8889). Didn't pay a dime to the Intuits of the tax prep industry. Got my refund in about 2 weeks. It is a bit of a PITA in that you have to understand what forms you need and why and they will kick it back in a few hours after submission so you can correct things like a missing zip code on a W-2, but all in all it
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Interesting, thanks! We'll see how long it lasts.
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... and they will kick it back in a few hours after submission so you can correct things like a missing zip code on a W-2
Funny you should say that, that's exactly why mine got kicked back overnight.
"This government computer can process over nine tax returns a day. Did you really think you could fool it?"
Doesn't support Firefox, so it is one of the few instances where I am required to use Chrome on my Linux box.
I've been using Free Fillable Forms for a few years now with Firefox and haven't had any issues. And this is running on FreeBSD with Ublock Origin installed. Yeah, each year I'm a bit surprised it still works, but I'll take my wins however I can.
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"...because voters aren't all that bringt..." Whoa there, Mao Zedong...
Re: This has nothing to do with efficiency (Score:1)
Trump doubled the standard deduction in his first term (part of the "tax break for millionaires and billionaires"), then when Biden got into office he left the increased standard deduction in place, but when Trump returned to office Democrats fought Trump trying to make the doubled standard deduction permanent (again, labeling it a "tax cut for millionaires and billionaires")
layoffs brought to you by Intuit and H&R Block (Score:2)
Where is Muskie and big-balls? (Score:3)
I thought they were going to re-write the whole thing in 30 days using AI. Weren’t they sleeping on the floor until they got it done?
Maybe that was social security. I’ve forgotten.
but you do you, ya jerkoff (Score:1)
lol you guys are so fucked. the first thing any fascist does is reduce the capacity of the government to govern. how can you not know this basic shit, honest to christ? "land of the free" my ass... you can't just keep letting him do it, morons, he'll take your pensions for himself as soon as he can! which might not be worth anything anyway by the time he gets done smashing everything
but he'll take it all the same - to russia, to buy a bit more silence from putin about those hotel videos we're all suppo
Re: but you do you, ya jerkoff (Score:1)
but he'll take it all the same - to russia, to buy a bit more silence from putin about those hotel videos we're all supposed to pretend we don't know exist
What tapes? You do know the Steele Dossier is all made up, right? The Obama FBI offered Steele a $1 Million payment if he could prove the things in his Dossier, and oddly, the former British spy couldn't prove any of it? [cnn.com]
real goal (Score:2)
Re: real goal (Score:1)
So your argument is they are firing IT workers so they can automate return processing of returns?
WTF? How do you imagine returns are processed? Old men with green visors and sleeve protectors plowing through mountains of paper returns?
Wouldn't they need MORE it workers (not fewer) to automate return processing?
Government computers (Score:2)
"This government computer can process over nine tax returns per day. Did you really think you could fool it?"
I just re-submitted my return this morning after their computer rejected my return at 1:01 am this morning due to, of all things, a missing zip code that I forgot to transcribe.