The IRS Is Hiring: Agency Wants 700 More Agents For Tax Enforcement

Taxpayers may want to tread a little more carefully. After years of cutbacks, the IRS plans to add as many as 700 new staffers this year to chase after tax cheats.

“As we continue to operate with a constrained budget, an area of concern for all of us remains the significant decline in the number of employees across the IRS,” said IRS Commissioner John on May 4 in an internal memo initially reported by the Wall Street Journal. “With our budget down more than $900 million since 2010, there are unmet needs across the IRS and there have been few opportunities to hire new employees during the last six years.”

The numbers bear him out. Going back to Fiscal Year 2010 (FY2010), the number of revenue officers responsible for placing liens on taxpayer properties and forcing them to pay up has been slashed by 15 percent. Similarly, the workforce including revenue agents, who conducts audits of individual and business taxpayers, suffered a 16 percent reduction during the same time period.

Furthermore, the audit rate for individuals dropped to 0.84 percent last year, its lowest level in more than a decade last year. This was the third consecutive year showing an audit rate of less than one percent.

It’s not like Congress hasn’t been giving the IRS any money to operate, but the agency is constantly being pulled in different directions. Following five years of budget cuts, Congress upped the ante for FY2016 by $290 million, providing a total budget of $11.23 billion. However, most of those extra funds were earmarked for other uses, including improving taxpayer services and ID theft and security measures. Also, the IRS was recently tasked with enforcing penalties under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

In the memo, Koskinen said that the IRS reassessed its resources halfway through this fiscal year. It found that it had enough left in the coffers to hire between 600 and 700 new employees in the enforcement areas. “Our first priority for hiring this year was to address taxpayer service,” he noted. “We were able to add more than 1,000 W&I employees to our taxpayer phone lines after Congress provided $290 million specifically for taxpayer service, identity theft and cybersecurity.”

The decision to hire many revenue officers and agents also factored in other aspects, including retirements and other employee departures. “In previous years, job losses across the agency have helped us absorb the funding cuts we have received, but left us with large gaps in various areas across the agency,” said Koskinen. “This year, we’ve determined that we have the resources available to hire these employees as a result of the rate of attrition in enforcement and your continuing dedication to find efficiencies to help us with the budget.”

The IRS Commissioner claims that every dollar invested in the IRS returns at least $4 to the Treasury. He says the number is even higher when it involves enforcement.

The first group of new-hires is expected to be announced in several weeks. The employees will be assigned to the department with oversight of self-employed taxpayers and small business owners. Other high-level enforcement positions will be filed later in the year.

The news about the IRS hiring was met with mixed reactions. Some of our nation’s lawmakers even questioned how the IRS was able to suddenly come up with the cash. “It was only weeks ago that they were saying they did not have the money [to hire more employees] and today they do have the money?” said House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) in an interview with FoxNews.com. Chaffetz said he will be sending a letter to Koskinen requesting a complete accounting of the matter.