50,000 IRS employees will retire within the next 5 years.... You've been duped, by your handlers, trying to avoid paying taxes.
Opponents of the Inflation Reduction Act say 87,000 new IRS agents are coming to audit your taxes. Putting that number in context paints a different picture.
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The legislation will indeed result in increased audit activity, but claims of a new army of IRS agents and rampant audits on everyday Americans are misleading, tax experts say.
Below, tax pros explain where the money is going, why you’re very unlikely to be audited and what you can do now to make the prospect even unlikelier.
IRS hiring is meant to get to ‘status quo’
That 87,000-agent figure isn’t an arbitrary number. But to put it into context, it’s important to examine the state of the IRS.
“There are a bunch of problems. They have about 8 million unprocessed 2021 returns and only answered 11% of calls in 2021,” says Bill Smith, national director of tax technical services at CBIZ MHM’s National Tax Office in Washington, D.C. “There’s been a 17% reduction in the [IRS] workforce since 2010.”
What’s more, the IRS’s workforce is aging. Between retirement and other departures, the agency will lose around 50,000 of its 80,000 workers over the next five years, according to 2021 congressional testimony from IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig.
Back to the 87,000 new agents: That number comes from a May 2021 report from the Treasury Department assessing how the IRS could use an $80 billion appropriation. The report says the IRS could add nearly 87,000 new staff — not all of them enforcement agents — in order to “rebuild” and “revitalize” the agency.
In other words, that figure is not from the IRS or from the official law (how exactly the agency will spend the money remains to be seen). It’s an estimate that accounts for a huge amount of attrition at the agency.
“When we hear 87,000 agents, it sounds like a horrifying army of people. But it’s what they need to maintain, because people are exiting in volumes,” says Robert Cordasco, a certified public accountant and founder of Cordasco & Co. in Savannah, Georgia. “I don’t know how much it adds as much as it gets us to the status quo.”