Government Executive has been doing a fantastic job informing the public on how things are going within the understaffed IRS for the first weeks of the 2026 filing season. For example, they published this on February 4: ‘Setting this agency up for failure’: Amid staffing crunch, IRS taps employees with no relevant experience to assist during filing season.
TLDR: They pulled people from other departments like human resources and, to a lesser extent, IT with no direct tax experience to answer phones and process returns. What could go wrong?
Well it looks like the IRS needs to shuffle a few more people around to the front lines according to the latest at GovExec:
The Internal Revenue Service is transferring another batch of employees to assist during tax filing season, renewing concerns among the workforce that staff highly specialized in fields not directly related to taxes are being thrust into roles for which they have no qualification.
It’s fine, right? Surely they’re just double-checking work that’s already been performed by experienced peo–
IRS management is placing employees into contact representative and tax examiner roles, though emails obtained by Government Executive stated they will not engage with taxpayers directly or answer phones. Employees will evaluate and research records to answer inquiries from individual taxpayers or analyze tax returns to help correct accounts, the agency told impacted staff.
“As planned in advance of the 2026 tax season, the IRS will be redeploying resources to Taxpayer Services,” Joseph Ziegler, a former whistleblower related to IRS’ handling of Hunter Biden’s taxes and who now serves as the agency’s chief of internal consulting, said in an email to employees. “We are grateful to our team for their service to America and for their support of our mission.”
“I am grateful for no longer sitting on my a– wasting taxpayer money for months, but this has the potential to be a disaster,” said an employee who used to be in IT and was shuffled into Taxpayer Services for a couple months to GovExec. And then there’s this quote: “It’s going to be hard for a lot of people,” the employee said. “Most of us are 50-plus and being asked to learn something quickly.” Trial by fire, eh?
According to TIGTA’s most recent readiness report [PDF], the IRS is down 18,979 employees from 2024 to 2025. However, if you look at the 2021 numbers, it’s a difference of just 36. For the “key filing season” peeps, they shed 8,302 overall from 2024 to 2025 but are up 424 from 2021; significantly, submission processing took a hit in 2025 compared to both 2024 and 2021.
Here’s the rub: they were supposed to hire 2,220 Submission Processing people for the 2026 filing season however as of December 30, only 50 people had been onboarded.
From that same TIGTA report:
Submission Processing management stated it can take between 60 and 80 days to train new employees, so they may not be ready to assist during the 2026 Filing Season. Submission Processing management stated that they plan to continue onboarding the remaining employees during the 2026 Filing Season.
Despite having direct hire authority for filing season positions, the IRS was delayed in posting these job announcements because of a new hiring process. The new process includes getting approvals to hire from the IRS’s Chief Executive Officer and the Department of the Treasury before announcements can be posted. Selections must also be approved by the IRS Chief Executive Officer and the Department of the Treasury before employment offers can be made. Although the Submission Processing function was able to announce open positions during the shutdown, they could not conduct in-person direct hiring events. However, the IRS was able to conduct an in-person hiring event in January 2026.
It’s a similar mess in Accounts Management though they managed to hire a lot more people. But…you knew there was gonna be a but:
The Accounts Management function generally handles taxpayer contacts through telephone and mail. It is also responsible for processing adjustments to tax accounts and certain amended tax returns. Accounts Management uses the same employees to answer the telephones and process its adjustments inventory. As a result, Accounts Management has to balance their resources during the filing season to ensure that they are meeting their telephone level of service goals while managing their paper inventory.
In August 2025, the Accounts Management function received approval to hire approximately 3,500 employees for the 2026 Filing Season, which was approximately four months later than the approval for the 2025 Filing Season. Accounts Management onboarded 2,300 (66 percent) employees in September 2025 through December 2025, including during the shutdown.
Accounts Management leadership stated that they would typically onboard new hires no later than August 31, 2025, to ensure that employees are fully trained and ready by January 1, 2026. Since approval was not received until August 2025, the Accounts Management function modified its training for new employees to allow as many new employees as possible to be ready to assist taxpayers during the filing season. For example, new hires are typically trained to answer individual telephone questions and individual amended tax return questions. Now, they are only being trained to screen calls, i.e., route them to the right assistor, and answer basic questions on refunds. Accounts Management leadership also plans to increase overtime usage throughout the fiscal year to mitigate any negative impact of their hiring shortfall. We plan to monitor IRS’s use of overtime and taxpayer service performance in upcoming reviews.
Oh good, that will be fun to read.
If you think this is a new problem the IRS is having please consult this June 2024 article: As Prophesied, the IRS Is Struggling to Hire All Those New Agents
