40% of techies culled from tax collection agency • The Register

Job cuts on the IRS’s tech arm have gone sooner and farther than anticipated, with 40 p.c of IT employees and four-fifths of tech leaders gone, the company’s CIO revealed yesterday.

Kaschit Pandya detailed the extent of the tech reorganization throughout a panel on the Affiliation of Authorities Accountants yesterday, describing it as the most important in 20 years.

This occurred because the Trump administration reshaped the federal paperwork final yr with Elon Musk’s DOGE wielding the chainsaw.

The IRS misplaced 1 / 4 of its workforce general in 2025. However the tech crew was clearly affected extra deeply. At first of the yr, the crew encompassed round 8,500 staff.

As reported by Federal News Network (FNN), Pandya mentioned: “Final yr, we misplaced roughly 40 p.c of the IT employees and almost 80 p.c of the execs.”

“So clearly there was a chance, and I assumed the chance that we would have liked to essentially execute was reorganizing.”

That included breaking apart silos throughout the group, he mentioned. “Everybody was working in their very own division or space.”

It’s not completely clear the place all these employees have gone. In keeping with a report by the US Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the IT division had 8,504 employees as of October 2024. As of October 2025, it had 7,135.

Nonetheless, reviews say that as a part of the reorganization, 1,000 techies had been detailed to work on delivering frontline providers throughout the US tax season. In keeping with FNN, these staff have questioned the knowledge of this transfer and its implementation.

At yesterday’s convention, Pandya mentioned higher outcomes had but to be delivered. “What it did not result in is mechanically all people coming collectively and dealing as one crew. We simply had totally different silos,” he mentioned. However his division had now arrange “cross-functional” groups targeted on end-to-end supply of particular person tasks.

“This fashion there is not a chilly hand-off of, ‘My job is X, and now I am handing it off to someone else,'” he mentioned.

In the end, he mentioned the purpose was to have the IT group as a complete working towards a “scorecard.”

Naturally, AI is anticipated to play a major function in all this, making individuals higher at their jobs and extra end-user-focused, he mentioned.

Nonetheless, Pandya mentioned IRS leaders are telling staff that AI will not endanger their jobs. Clearly the company is completely able to eliminating individuals the old style approach.

The US Treasury Inspector Common for Tax Administration mentioned final month the company was behind in its efforts to digitize paper returns. It famous: “The Info Know-how operate misplaced roughly 16 p.c of its employees,” who’re liable for updates for inflation and expiring or newly enacted tax provisions. This meant that “in response to the IRS readiness reviews, implementation of those legislative adjustments is in danger for the 2026 Submitting Season.” ®