IRS Takes Some Job Offers Off the Table as Tax Season Begins

IRS | January 27, 2025

IRS Takes Some Job Offers Off the Table as Tax Season Begins

Tax season 2025 began on Monday, but for some people who were set to start a career at the IRS during the agency's busiest time of the year, their new opportunity has come to a screeching halt because of a hiring freeze put in place by President Donald Trump during his first week in office.

Jason Bramwell

Tax season 2025 began on Monday, but for some people who were set to start a career at the IRS during the agency’s busiest time of the year, their new opportunity has come to a screeching halt because of a hiring freeze put in place by President Donald Trump during his first week in office.

All job offers with a start date on or before Feb. 8, 2025, will be allowed to continue/proceed with the hiring/onboarding process, the IRS said in a post on its jobs website. However, offers with a start date after Feb. 8, 2025, or those with an unconfirmed start date will be revoked. 

In addition, the IRS said any jobs posted to USAJOBS.gov and any other external website used to market jobs with the federal government, such as Monster.com or LinkedIn, will be removed.

Here is the full text from the IRS’s message to job seekers:

Thank you for your interest in employment with the Internal Revenue Service.

Due to the Executive Order signed by the President on January 20, 2025, the Federal government has been placed on a hiring freeze. For your convenience, the link to the official White House communication related to the Federal Hiring Freeze is contained here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/hiring-freeze/.

The Office of Management and Budget and U.S. Office of Personnel Management issued a joint memorandum titled, “Federal Civilian Hiring Freeze Guidance.” This joint memorandum provides additional guidance regarding the freeze on the hiring of federal civilian employees as directed by the President and clarifies immediate actions to be taken by agencies to implement the Presidential Memorandum as it relates to current job offers and jobs posted on USAJOBS, or any other external websites used to market jobs with the federal government: 

  • Offers with a start date ON OR BEFORE February 8, 2025, will be allowed to continue/proceed with the hiring/onboarding process.
  • Offers with a start date AFTER February 8, 2025, OR an unconfirmed start date will be revoked. 
  • All jobs posted to USAJOBS.gov and/or any other external website used to market jobs (for example, Monster or LinkedIn) with the federal government will be removed. 

The president’s executive order to freeze hiring at federal agencies is expected to last at least 90 days, except at the IRS. Trump ordered the freeze to remain in effect for the IRS until the Treasury secretary determines it’s of national interest to lift the order. 

One person posted on Reddit last week that his mother-in-law, who used to work at the IRS, reapplied and got a job offer. It was a “done deal,” he wrote.

“They offered her the position, they had done the background check and fingerprinting, and she was a repeat employee,” he wrote. “This morning she gets an email saying that they are rescinding all current job offers due to a federal hiring freeze from Trump that went into effect Jan 20th, 2025.”

Another Redditor posted last week that they received an email from the IRS informing them that their revenue agent job offer was rescinded due to a hiring freeze.

“I’m beyond frustrated because this process took seven stressful months, including interviews, assessments, and endless waiting. When I finally got the FJO, I even turned down another great job offer because I believed in the stability and opportunities this role promised,” the person wrote. “Now, I’m left wondering if there’s any chance they’ll reach back out once the freeze is lifted.”

Leander, TX resident Keith Marshman told the ABC News affiliate in Austin that he had just landed a job as a clerk at the IRS. But his offer was recently pulled.

KVUE reported Jan. 22:

For a year-and-a-half, Leander resident Keith Marshman has been unemployed, keeping his nose to the grindstone to find a job. 

“I’ve gone through my savings, and I had a significant amount of savings. I had a significant amount in my medical account that’s gone now,” Marshman said. “I’m basically living off credit cards.”

Marshman said he has a chronic condition and needs a job with more sedentary work. 

“I’m older. I want to be in front of a computer and put in entry data, search through databases, things like that,” Marshman said. 

Finally, Marshman saw light at the end of the tunnel after going to a job fair and landing a job as a clerk at the IRS in Austin. Then, he heard about President Donald Trump’s executive order to freeze federal hiring, which is expected to last 90 days. It was not long before he got an email, saying the IRS is now rescinding his job offer. 

“And I go, ‘Well, there goes my hopes and dreams for the year,'” Marshman said. 

There’s concern that the hiring freeze at the IRS could result in delays processing tax returns and sending refunds to taxpayers during filing season. The IRS expects more than 140 million individual tax returns to be filed ahead of the April 15 federal deadline.

In a post on LinkedIn late last week, former IRS commissioner Charles Rettig, who headed the agency during President Trump’s first term in office, wrote that every facet of IRS operations will be significantly impacted by the current hiring freeze.

“Fortunately, IRS employees are resilient and have considerable experience with hiring freeze operations. Many seasoned, highly respected tax professionals began their careers working for the IRS or DOJ-Tax, an invaluable experience from most every perspective,” he wrote. “The IRS struggled through a hiring freeze from 2011 to 2018 and annual continuing resolutions (CR) brought on by a dysfunctional Congress (leading to the inability to replace retiring employees during the CR and delayed receipt of annual funding until midway thru each fiscal year). As I recall, since 2001 there have been more than 100 CRs. IRS employees do their best with the limited resources and support received. IRS annual gross revenue is approximately 95% of the gross revenue of the United States—the IRS and IRS employees are critically important to the future of our country.

“Many sometimes question the inability of the IRS to achieve its mission in delivering a meaningful taxpayer experience and a fair level of tax enforcement. However, it is difficult to deliver a private sector experience with so much uncertainty in current and future operations,” Rettig continued. “In fact, it is somewhat amazing these particular trains run at all, let alone anywhere close to on time.”

The following day, Rettig posted on LinkedIn that he believes filing season 2025 will still be a success.

“All available resources will be appropriated to the FS25 effort and the IRS employees will make it happen—‘best of the best’ in federal government—guaranteed!”

Melanie Lauridsen, AICPA vice president of tax policy and advocacy, wrote on LinkedIn last Tuesday that Trump’s executive order halting the hiring of federal workers poses “no concern” to the IRS as the agency has already brought seasonal workers aboard and trained them ahead of the 2025 tax season.

She posted late last week that the AICPA is watching closely for potential impacts to the federal workforce and, in particular, the IRS. 

“We are greatly sensitive to the filing season service challenges for members and taxpayers,” she wrote. “While the AICPA acknowledges some concerns regarding the impact that the hiring freeze will have on #tax administration, the IRS has said they will ‘reallocate workers from other areas to help cover filing season processing’ to meet the needs of this filing season.”

It’s also worth noting that the IRS is starting tax season 2025 without a full-time leader. Danny Werfel resigned as IRS commissioner on Jan. 20, the day of Trump’s inauguration. The president said last month he has selected former U.S. Rep. Billy Long (R-MO) to serve as IRS commissioner, enlisting a Republican who served in Congress for an incoming administration aiming to renew and expand a broad package of tax cuts. The Senate still has to approve Long’s nomination.

Until then, IRS deputy commissioner Douglas O’Donnell has taken over as acting commissioner, O’Donnell served as acting IRS commissioner from late November 2022 until March 2023—the period after Rettig stepped down as chief of the tax agency and until Werfel took over.

The IRS has bolstered hiring since receiving nearly $80 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022. The money would be spread out over 10 years and be used to modernize its business systems, improve taxpayer services, hire new employees, and to bolster tax enforcement.

However, a good chunk of that money was clawed back, as a 2023 debt ceiling and budget cuts deal between Republicans and the Biden administration led to $1.4 billion being rescinded from the IRS and a separate agreement was reached to take $20 billion from the agency and distribute those funds to other nondefense programs.

According to an August 2022 Bloomberg report, the IRS has lost more than 23,000 employees since 2010—to 80,000 at the height of tax season 2022—and it’s estimated that the tax agency is going to lose approximately 50,000 more in the next five years due to retirement.

But those retiring IRS employees aren’t what made national headlines after the Inflation Reduction Act was enacted. What did were claims by some Republican lawmakers that the IRS will use the federal funding to hire 87,000 “agents” in an effort to increase audits of the middle class—both of which are not true, the IRS said at the time.

So where did that 87,000 number come from? The American Families Plan Tax Compliance Agenda published by the Treasury Department in May 2021 included a proposed IRS funding plan for the next 10 years. Page 16 of that report includes a proposal for funds of approximately $79.2 billion. Table 3 on page 16 indicates that such an allocation of funds would allow the IRS to hire an estimated 86,852 full-time equivalent (FTE) employees (approximately 87,000) over the next decade. Those funds would be used to hire additional staff at all levels, including customer service, revenue agents, revenue officers, special agents, and other professional staff.

But that 87,000 number still concerns Republican lawmakers, many of whom believe that the federal government is bloated enough with too many employees. Over the weekend, Trump floated the idea of moving IRS agents hired under the Biden administration to the border to patrol the area while armed with guns.

“On day one, I immediately halted the hiring of any new IRS agents. They hired, or tried to hire, 88,000 new workers to go after you. And we’re in the process of developing a plan to either terminate all of them or maybe we’ll move them to the border. And I think we’re going to move them to the border,” Trump said during a rally at Circa Resort & Casino in Las Vegas on Saturday evening, according to Fox News. “Where they’re allowed to carry guns, you know, they’re so strong on guns, but these people are allowed to carry guns, so we’ll probably move them to the border.”

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Comments: 1

Mike WennerFebruary 4 2025 at 12:12 pm

All CPAs and tax attorneys should be furious with this on going decimation of an already under supported entity. Two year appeals wait times. An insecure readily hacked system and untrained agents and Don the Con wants to send them to the border. So sick of these stupid people.

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