The Republican leader of the Senate’s government efficiency (DOGE) caucus is calling on the IRS to clamp down on its current and former workers who haven’t paid their share to Uncle Sam — to the tune of up to $46 million.
More than 5,800 IRS employees and contractors were found to be delinquent as of May 2023, according to a watchdog report released in July 2024.
A little more than a third of those workers (2,034) were on installment agreements to cough up roughly $17 million, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) — but the rest were not.
As of November 2024, 860 IRS workers who had overdue tax bills were still on the federal payroll — including 50 who were deemed to have “willfully evaded” collection, according to the Washington Examiner.
“As the agency primarily responsible for administering federal tax law, the IRS must ensure that federal employees comply with the tax law in order to maintain the public’s confidence,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) wrote in a Tuesday letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
“In the era of DOGE, I hope the IRS can get its own house in order, before going after private citizens.”
Unpaid taxes have long vexed the IRS. Back in 2022, the agency estimated that the gap between total taxes owed and what was paid on time was about $696 billion.
Thousands of federal workers have not kept up with their obligations, as a TIGTA report from March 2023 found that more than 42,000 civilian government employees neglected to file a tax return on time for multiple fiscal years between Oct. 1, 2015, and Sept. 30, 2020.
Most of those “repeat nonfiles” worked in the Post Office (9,056 employees), Department of Veterans Affairs (6,586), or the Army (4,459), per the report.
The Treasury’s tax watchdog also found in its July 2024 report that the IRS had rehired 397 employees and tapped 115 ex-workers as contractors who had confirmed issues with tax noncompliance or other inappropriate conduct.
According to Ernst, IRS “contractors rehired 300 former employees who had been let go for issues like criminal misconduct, sexual misconduct, inability to perform duties, fighting and assault, and unauthorized access to tax return information.”
The letter to Bessent was sent exactly three weeks before Tax Day.
“The IRS is America’s least favorite agency,” Ernst told The Post. “The agency is in desperate need of reform. Ahead of Tax Day, it’s time to conduct a full accounting of the IRS and finally make it make cents for the American people.”
The Ernst letter also pushed Bessent to fix the agency’s antiquated internal systems for collecting taxes.
Last year, the House passed the bipartisan SAMOSA Act, which proponents say could save $750 million a year by consolidating software licenses for key digital services. Ernst has pushed for the bill to be revived in the current Congress.
Roughly a quarter of IRS software, a third of agency programs and 10% of its hardware are run on legacy systems, according to a 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office.
Ernst highlighted the report’s conclusion that the IRS does not “track specific costs for legacy assets” and bashed the tax agency for limiting the online tool for small business to obtain an employer identification
number (EIN) to Mondays through Fridays only.
The Iowan argued that while the IRS might not be able to do everything outlined in the SAMOSA Act, the agency could review the EIN program and make it available 24/7.