Endless phone applies. Slower reimbursements. Larger budget deficits.
That is just a part of what could be in store for Americans if the Trump administration continues with the plans that it is said to be considering reducing the workforce of the Internal Revenue Service in two, according to tax experts.
The move would not only reverse recent efforts to rest and modernize the IRS, but threatens to fundamentally paralyze an agency that is responsible for processing around 270 million tax returns of individuals and companies every year, both democratic and Republican former officials told Yahoo Finance.
“Even with recent technological improvements, every internal and external IRS function will be in danger,” said Charles Rettig, who served the Handpicked IRS commissioner of Donald Trump during his first term, in an e -mail to Yahoo Finance. “The agency will probably have difficulty meet the basic levels of services and compliance.”
The IRS has already fired around 7,000 probation staff as part of Trump’s broader effort to lower federal bureaucracy, so that concern could influence the service during this year’s submission season. But if the New York Times And Associated Press This week unveiled, the leaders of the office are now considering cutting back another 50% on its approximately 90,000-strong workforce. The IRS did not respond to requests for comments.
Such a reduction would leave the IRS with less manpower than with each time since the 1950s.
David Kamin, a professor in NYU Tax Law who served as an economic adviser to former President Joe Biden, said it was difficult to imagine how the agency would even work with that level of resources.
“We didn’t have IRS who is so in modern times, with the economy we have today and the tax code we have today,” he said. “But it cannot function in any way the way we have seen it function.”
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During the Biden government, Democrats tried to rebuild the IRS after a decade in which cutbacks had hit the budget workforce to levels from the 1970s and audit rates More than half fell over individual returns. The party included $ 80 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act to modernize the customer service and processing systems of the agency and enforce the enforcement of the agency, with the aim of gathering, with the aim of gathering More of the gross $ 600 billion Americans do not pay taxes every year.
That money helped the IRS to solve many of the service problems that popped up during the pandemic when the telephone lines were overwhelmed and many returns were delayed. Among other things, the agency has hired more representatives from customer service, who – at least through his main measure – reduces the waiting times During phone calls during the submission season from 28 minutes to 3 minutes, and An attempt launched To reduce the notorious backlogs by digitizing more paper returns. It also started to hire tens of thousands of more employees, with the aim of significant increasing audits about the rich and large companies against the tax year 2026.