Even with a major hiring push the IRS projects to gain only around 5,000 to 10,000 due to separations. Image: Jonathan Weiss/Shutterstock.com
Although last year’s Inflation Reduction Act provided the IRS with additional long-term funding for purposes including hiring, the agency still is facing challenges in filling vacant positions, an IG report has said.
That law provided some $80 billion above prior expected spending over the next 10 years for purposes including enforcement, operations support, taxpayer services and business systems modernization. The House recent voted to cancel future outlays under the law, with much of the opposition citing a mischaracterization that the funds would double the agency in size even though most of the projected hiring would merely keep up with attrition over that time. The bill is not expected to advance any farther.
The IG focused on the early focus on hiring under that law, seeking to increase staffing at taxpayer assistance centers, reducing the backlog of unprocessed returns and improving the level of telephone service. For example, it said that the initial goal was to hire 5,000 additional customer service representatives by last September so that they would be fully trained in time for this year’s filing season. The agency instead was able to hire only some 4,700 by November, and attrition reduced the net gain to about 3,800, the report said.
It said that while the agency further had a goal of filling 19,000 positions in total in fiscal 2023, “realistically the net gain of employees will be closer to 5,000 to 10,000 as these new hires will be offset by separations. A continued challenge the IRS faces is having to evaluate a high number of applicants in order to find successful candidates both willing to accept the job offer and also be able to pass the required background checks.”
The report said that through the first nine months of calendar year 2022, the IRS received some 565,000 applications and made some 46,000 tentative offers. Of those, nearly 27,000 were accepted, resulting in 24,000 firm offers, of which 21,000 were accepted, resulting in 19,000 hires.
It added that since then, the IRS has received permission to use direct hire authority for up to 4,500 positions in operations support through 2024 and for up to 10,000 positions annually in the services and enforcement organizations through 2027. It said that using direct hire reduces the average time to hire a new customer service representative from about eight months to two.
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