According to the leader of the union that represents most of the Internal Revenue Service workforce, the IRS plans to hire 10,000 new full-time workers and the hiring process is scheduled to run through Dec. 31, 2023.
The new entry-level hirings are to help the agency reduce its backlog of millions of unprocessed tax returns and other mail from individual and business taxpayers. The massive accumulation of paperwork still awaiting processing dates back to last year.
The union’s national president, Tony Reardon, says that according to the notification sent to the National Treasury Employees Union, IRS has been granted Direct Hire Authority for roughly 10,000 positions in submission processing and accounts management.
Pointing that the most recent effort to hire 5,000 new IRS employees has fallen flat so far- less than 200 workers were brought on board- Chad Hooper, president of the Professional Managers Association that represents non-union personnel, believes that the new plan is an extension of that plan.
However, Hooper seemed skeptical about how easily it could be fulfilled, given the recent hiring misfire.
IRS’s paper backlog includes at least 10 million individual tax returns and 4 million business tax returns along with some 8 million additional pieces of other mail, including taxpayer responses to automated IRS letters they’ve received often in error.
IRS has already started shifting this month around 1,200 workers from their current jobs to deal with the backlog through September, but extra personnel is needed to return the backlog to a manageable level by the end of the year.
According to its website, the IRS workforce currently sits at about 80,000, down from its peak of about 94,700 employees in 2010 and 2011.
Along with declining or flat appropriations from Congress that reduced the agency’s spending by 20% in inflation-adjusted dollars, retirement and attrition contributed to decreasing the workforce to less than 75,800 in 2020.
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