The IRS’s legion of new hires is thanks to its massive $78 billion funding boost.
A watchdog overseeing the IRS has revealed that the agency is hiring 5,582 tax enforcers this year, although it dismissed as “unfounded” media reports claiming the tax agency is hiring “87,000-armed enforcement agents” because only a fraction of the new hires will carry guns.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), which is the watchdog overseeing the IRS, disclosed the agency’s hiring plans for 2024 in an April 3 report on how the IRS is spending its $78 billion funding boost.
The IRS got roughly $79.4 billion in supplemental funding when President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 into law, though Congress later clawed back around $1.4 billion.
Still, even with the clawback, the massive cash infusion represented a roughly 600-percent increase over the IRS’ prior year budget.
Republicans warned at the time that the money would be used to hire an “army of 87,000” tax enforcers who would come down hard on ordinary Americans and squeeze them for “every last penny.”
As claims of the “army of 87,000” enforcers captured the spotlight, the IRS went to great pains to push back on this notion. Various Biden administration officials insisted audits wouldn’t rise for Americans making less than $400,000 per year, even though the very same watchdog—TIGTA—warned that this promise could be hard to keep because the IRS uses outdated income thresholds and has “no way to identify the complete population of taxpayers that meet the criterion of $400,000.”
In its latest report, the watchdog weighed in on the 87,000 tax enforcement army, while noting that its Office of Audit is currently assessing the IRS’s hiring practices.
“There has been widespread reporting that the IRS will be hiring 87,000-armed enforcement agents,” the watchdog wrote in the report, adding that “this claim is unfounded.”
“The only enforcement personnel employed by the IRS who are armed are Criminal Investigation Division special agents,” TIGTA added, noting also that special agents have the lowest number of staff of all the IRS’s enforcement personnel.
By Tom Ozimek
