The Taxpayer Advocate Service, which operates as an internal watchdog, would see deeper workforce reductions than the agency overall.
By Shannon Najmabadi and Jacob Bogage, The Washington PostThe IRS building in Washington, seen last month. The Trump administration is set to cut more than 20% of the staff at the taxpayer help branch of the IRS, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post, eliminating jobs designed to help people struggling with their finances, identity theft or other tax issues.
The Taxpayer Advocate Service is slated to lose 430 of about 1,900 employees in an initial phase of staff reductions. Those cuts would come in addition to more than 90 employees who took deferred resignation offers or were laid off earlier this year, according to the plan, which the agency is in the final stages of implementing, according to two people familiar with it, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private meetings. Overall, the tax agency would shed 18% of its workforce by mid-May compared with the workforce it had in January, according to the people and internal agency records. The Taxpayer Advocate Service would lose more than a quarter of the staff it had at the beginning of the year. National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins said the IRS is working with the Treasury Department “on the scope and allocation of workforce reductions.”Spokespeople for the Treasury Department and the IRS did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Taxpayer Advocate Service is part of the IRS but operates independently as its internal watchdog. It identifies major problems facing taxpayers, recommends fixes and assists people with individual problems. For instance, the service might help a person who has tried to resolve an identity theft case for a year or someone struggling to pay rent while the IRS has a levy on their bank account.“I think will have devastating consequences to the taxpayers that are in need of help,” said Nina Olson, who was the national taxpayer advocate from 2001 to 2019. The service helps people with low incomes, but also small businesses, surviving spouses and wealthier filers who just cannot “get their problems resolved through normal channels,” Olson said. When she joined the service shortly after it was created in the 1990s, she said it had about 2,000 employees - similar to the head count at the start of 2025.The proposal is part of the White House’s push to scale back the size of the federal government, which includes laying off employees and ending some contracts and leases. The effort has largely been steered by Elon Musk and his allies on the U.S. DOGE Service, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, though it’s a White House office, not a Cabinet department. The cuts largely reverse gains the agency made with Inflation Reduction Act funding championed by President Joe Biden, which was meant to help improve operations and customer service after years of budget cuts. That law increased staffing significantly, so that even after the proposed cuts, the IRS would have more workers than before the IRA passed. The agency would have about 84,000 employees by mid-May, under the plan’s projections, compared with about 80,000 in 2021. The administration in February terminated about 7,000 probationary IRS employees, equivalent to about 7% of the tax agency’s workforce. It’s unclear if some of those laid-off employees will be rehired; two judges last week ordered federal officials to reinstate probationary workers fired from several agencies, including the Treasury Department, which encompasses the IRS. Some laid-off IRS employees have received emails rescinding their terminations. The employees will be placed on administrative leave until they are reinstated to federal service, according to documents provided by two of the laid-off employees. Fewer than 10 probationary employees were fired from the Taxpayer Advocate Service in February, according to agency documents.
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