Treasury Department to cut IRS taxpayer advocate staff

The Trump administration is intending to make cuts to the office of the National Taxpayer Advocate (NTA) — its third announced staffing reduction at the Internal Revenue Service that comes amid a broader initiative to drastically reduce the federal workforce.

In response to a question from The Hill about reductions to the workforce of the NTA, which reports to Congress about IRS service levels and advocates individual taxpayer cases to the IRS, a Treasury Department spokesperson told The Hill that the agency was seeking to “right-size” its workforce.

“These adjustments to right-size the NTA will in no way negatively impact that mission nor service to taxpayers in any meaningful way,” a Treasury Department spokesperson said in a statement.

The confirmation of the NTA layoffs follows a report from The Washington Post that the NTA would lay off 25 percent of its staff.

It also follows reports that the Trump administration is planning to get rid of nearly 20 percent of the IRS workforce in general, though Treasury Department officials said Friday that they didn’t have a specific number in mind for the overall staffing reduction at the national tax collection agency.

The IRS has already fired nearly 7,000 trial employees, more than 5,000 of whom were focused on tax compliance.

The announced reductions come during the middle of the 2024 tax filing season, a time when many taxpayers seek help filing their taxes within the U.S.’s exceedingly complex tax system.

Service levels during the 2024 filing season were grim, with less than a third of calls answered by live IRS agents. Agents answered 31 percent of calls in 2024, 29 percent of calls in 2023, and just 13 percent of calls in 2022, according to the NTA’s annual report to Congress.

In many advanced economies, tax filing is done by the government on behalf of taxpayers, vastly simplifying the process of paying taxes.

A Treasury Department spokesperson said that the budget of the NTA has been increasing while the caseload of the organization has been staying the same.

“From 2021 to 2024, despite no growth in the number of cases received, the budget of the NTA grew almost 30 percent to $271 million,” the spokesperson added.

The total budgetary request of the IRS was $14.1 billion in fiscal 2024, or 0.2 percent of the $6.8 trillion in total government spending that year.

Every year the agency fails to collect around $700 billion in taxes that are owed to the government, an amount known as the tax gap that could actually be as large as $1 trillion annually, according to a statement by former IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig in 2022.

At that level, the tax gap would be nearly 4 percent of total U.S. economic output.

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