The Internal Revenue Service is demanding a further $20 billion from Congress in order to hire another 14,000 more employees as part of an effort to better “serve taxpayers.”
According to IRS Commissioner, Daniel Werfel, the agency needs the money in order to fund technology upgrades and improve its customer service:
The IRS will continue focusing on making improvements and efficient use of funding. But to stress the importance of continuing this momentum, the IRS will continue working to make a difference for the nation’s taxpayers. At the same time, it’s critical that the IRS has stable, secure funding to allow technology modernization and taxpayer service improvements to continue into the future.
Werfel added that he plans to hire a further 14,000 employees over the next few years, with an estimated workforce of 102,500 by 2029.
We believe that figure represents a ‘right-sized’ IRS, reflecting the needs to serve taxpayers and responsibly enforce the law given the complexity of the nation’s tax laws. That number won’t even be a record high for the IRS workforce. It’s still well below the numbers from the late 1980s and early 1990s.
His pleas come less than two years after Congress passed the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which included a staggering $80 billion windfall for the agency to expand its operations.
Meanwhile, Werfel also pledged to take steps to address the significant dispraity audit rates between Black taxpayers and other filers, arguing this “degrades trust in our tax system.”
“We are overhauling compliance efforts to advance our commitment to fair, equitable and effective tax administration and hold ourselves accountable to taxpayers we serve,” he said.
“We have taken swift initial action to dramatically reduce the number of those audits,” he continued. “We have also made changes to the selection criteria for those audits.”
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