Rajiv Uppal, who has served as chief information officer at the IRS since January 2024, is leaving the agency, adding to the growing list of IRS leaders who are planning their exits as a result of the Trump administration’s plan to reduce the federal workforce.
Uppal, who is taking the latest deferred resignation offer given to IRS employees, will leave April 28, according to a Bloomberg Tax report. He will be succeeded by Kaschit Pandya, current chief technology officer at the IRS. Pandya will serve as acting CIO overseeing technology at the agency while senior leadership finalizes longer-term plans for the job.
- Related article: IRS Workers Get Final Chance to Take Deferred Resignation Offer
- Related article: Acting IRS Chief to Leave After Agency Makes Immigrant Tax Data-Sharing Deal with DHS
“He is a great leader and actually brilliant,” one person wrote on Reddit about Uppal. “Whatever ran him off is a terrible un-American shame. There’s no way in my mind he would do this lightly. … Seriously, this is so freaking wrong. Ask anyone who knows him, he is a damn good man.”
The Trump administration re-opened its deferred resignation program offer, known as “DRP 2.0,” earlier this month—allowing employees who take the deal to be on paid administrative leave through Sept. 30—giving another incentive for workers to leave and help its effort to shrink the federal workforce. Employees who take the offer will be offboarded as soon as April 28.
Before joining the IRS, Uppal was the director of the Office of Information Technology and chief information officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He has more than 25 years of IT expertise in both the public and private sectors.
Uppal is following several other IRS executives out the door, including acting commissioner Melanie Krause, who also is taking DRP 2.0. Krause reportedly resigned after the Treasury Department and the Department of Homeland Security reached a deal last week for the IRS to share the tax data of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. to assist with immigration enforcement. She is reportedly leaving the agency in mid-May.
Krause is the third leader of the tax agency to leave since the start of 2025. Danny Werfel, who served as IRS commissioner during the Biden administration, resigned on Jan. 20—the day of Donald Trump’s second inauguration as president. Werfel was replaced by deputy commissioner Douglas O’Donnell, who served as acting IRS chief until his retirement on Feb. 28 after roughly 40 years of service as furor spread over Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency gaining access to IRS taxpayer data. Krause, who was the agency’s chief operating officer, took over as acting commissioner following O’Donnell’s retirement.
Billy Long, a Republican congressman from Missouri from 2011 until 2023, was nominated by Trump to be the next IRS commissioner; however, the Senate has yet to schedule confirmation hearings for Long.
Other IRS leaders who resigned from the agency along with Krause include Kathleen Walters, chief privacy officer, CFO Teresa Hunter, and Mike Wetklow, chief risk officer. All three have posted on LinkedIn that they are “open to work.”
In addition, Chief Human Capital Officer Traci DiMartini was placed on administrative leave pending termination on March 3 and was reportedly dismissed on March 5.
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