The IRS completed a “successful 2025 filing season” with 87% of taxpayer phone calls answered by customer service representatives and average wait times of three minutes, the agency said last week, despite workforce reductions and leadership changes that have put the IRS at times in a state of turmoil since President Donald Trump took office in January.
The filing season update was included in a Treasury Department budget-in-brief on the IRS, in which the agency touted its biggest achievements for the 2025 filing season, as of April 19. They include:
- Responded to 8.9 million Accounts Management (AM) calls [down from 9 million in 2024].
- Accomplished an AM average speed to answer/wait time of three minutes [same wait time as 2023 and 2024, down from 28 minutes in 2022].
- Concluded filing season with a customer service representative level of service of 87% [down from 88% in 2024].
- Achieved a 6% increase in customer satisfaction among visitors to IRS.gov.
- Offered the callback feature to about 2.6 million taxpayers, saving taxpayers more than 742,000 hours of hold time.
- Extended in-person hours at Taxpayer Assistance Center locations across the nation (including evening and Saturday hours), generating more than 15,000 extra service hours.
“For the 2025 filing season, the IRS used new filters to detect potential identity theft and prevent the issuance of fraudulent refunds. Tax returns identified by these filters are held during processing until the IRS can verify the taxpayer’s identity,” the agency says in the budget-in-brief. “As of May 14, 2025, using these filters, the IRS confirmed more than 84,000 tax returns as fraudulent and prevented the issuance of approximately $1 billion in fraudulent refunds.”
The budget-in-brief also noted that Trump has proposed $9.8 billion in annual funding for the IRS in his fiscal year 2026 budget, down $2.5 billion—or 20% less—than the $12.3 billion proposed by the Biden administration last year.
While the proposed IRS budget shows a 31% increase in funds earmarked for taxpayer services, money for enforcement, as well as technology and operations support, has been reduced by 34% and 37%, respectively.
The budget-in-brief states:
Under the FY 2026 request, the IRS will prioritize revenue collections, modernizing the taxpayer experience with critical technology modernization investments, and preserving privacy for taxpayers. The Secretary [Scott Bessent] and Acting IRS Commissioner [Michael Faulkender] are committed to providing American taxpayers with high-quality service, ensuring fair compliance, and safeguarding data privacy. The IRS is working to substantially complete most key IT modernization initiatives in the next two years. The modernization efforts are focused on expanding automation, enhancing data integration, and improving system interoperability to better support taxpayer service and internal operations. These projects will ultimately deliver capabilities designed to standardize data across the enterprise, strengthen analytics and reporting, and accelerate the delivery of digital services. These improvements will enable the IRS to better focus audit resources on more significant pockets of non-compliance, use modern technology applications to provide taxpayers secure, 24/7 online access to their own tax information. Modernized platforms and applications will also allow IRS employees with appropriate authorization to have a secure, 360 view of relevant tax information to provide a better experience for taxpayers they interact with, and better safeguard private financial information.
Base funding will be redirected from lower priority programs to cover the priorities of the Administration, including policies outlined in executive orders and other policy statements. To support the Secretary’s revenue collection priority, IRS is expanding its use of Enterprise Case Management (ECM) which is currently being used by about 9,000 staff and will meaningfully reduce time and cost to carry out critical compliance functions. By the end of calendar year 2025, about 15,000 staff will be leveraging the ECM applications already in production.
In addition to the effective and efficient processes already put in place in FY 2025, the IRS will limit contract spending to mission critical needs and refocus IT contract spending to further optimize resource allocation, reduce costs, and streamline current processes. To better align with new priorities, the IRS is also currently conducting detailed reviews of contracts, cloud migration, licensing fees and subscriptions, IT spending, and travel. These efforts are expected to yield significant savings to the taxpayer in the coming years.
It has been a wild last four months at the IRS as the Trump administration has put plans into place to cut costs and pare down the federal workforce, including at the tax agency.
As of March, 11,443 IRS employees were either approved to take the Trump administration’s first deferred resignation program offer or received termination notices during their probationary employment period, according to a recent report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. In addition, more than 23,000 employees applied for a second buyout offer from the Treasury Department in early April, and 13,124 were approved as of April 22, TIGTA said.
More than 7,000 IRS probationary workers—who have fewer protections than long-term workers—were laid off by the Trump administration on Feb. 20. However, impacted workers were later reinstated and put on paid administrative leave in March after two favorable court rulings. They were set to return to work on April 14, but that plan was put on hold by the IRS.
However, impacted employees—those who didn’t take the two deferred resignation program offers from the Trump administration and the Treasury Department or requested to take the second buyout, called “DRP 2.0” or TDRP, but were denied because their roles with the IRS were “deemed critical”—finally returned to their jobs on May 23.
In addition, Faulkender is the fourth acting IRS commissioner since Danny Werfel stepped down as IRS chief in January. He will remain in the position until Billy Long, a former member of the House of Representatives, is confirmed by the Senate.
Thanks for reading CPA Practice Advisor!
Subscribe Already registered? Log In
Need more information? Read the FAQs
