The Treasury Department on Thursday said the money will go toward tens of thousands of new employees, upgraded technology and expanded data and analytics capabilities.
The top priority for the IRS is restoring its depleted staffing levels, which are down 20 percent since 2010. The IRS expects to hire more than 7,000 service reps and 1,500 auditors this year.
Next year, the agency expects to further ramp up hiring, bringing on 6,400 service representatives, 7,200 auditors, 3,800 operations staff and 200 technology specialists.
New auditors will focus on cracking down on tax evasion by wealthy individuals, IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel told reporters.
“It makes sense to focus our initial Inflation Reduction Act implementation efforts exclusively on increasing our capacity to assess compliance of high-income and high-wealth individuals, complex partnerships and large corporations,” Werfel said.
Within the next five years, the IRS hopes to digitize all paper returns and allow users to file documents and respond to notices online as well as download their account information.
The plan also details new data and analytics capabilities for the IRS that will put taxpayer information into a more centralized and easily accessible system. Some voices in the tax world are worried about how much more power the new systems could give the IRS.
The Hill’s Tobias Burns spells out the IRS plan here.
