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Tax season is a source of angst for many Americans. This year, Internal Revenue Service employees who have returned to the office are in the same boat.
Amid the agency’s return-to-office mandate, which has been a priority for the White House DOGE office, workers said they’ve operated out of conference rooms and cafeterias, battled spotty internet connections, and navigated boxes of paperwork scattered throughout the halls.
“It was a huge mess,” one IRS employee told Business Insider. “There’s no space for everyone and no exceptions for this RTO.”
BI spoke with eight IRS employees who were granted anonymity. While they said it had come with certain upsides, like leaving work at the office, many said the return had been tumultuous and the opposite of efficient.
“People are not happy, and it’s going to affect productivity going forward,” one employee said.
Productivity is one thing, but taxpayer privacy — especially with a looming April 15 filing deadline — is another. With workers crammed into conference rooms, one told BI, “You have to be careful who can see over your shoulder or if the person next to you can see what you’re doing.”
The Treasury Department was “making every effort to return our entire workforce to meaningful in-person work quickly,” a spokesperson told BI. “Bureaus and offices are fast-tracking high impact building improvements and rearranging workspaces as quickly as possible to make this return to office as seamless and comfortable as possible.
“That said, about 5,000 IRS employees nationwide do not currently have an adequate workspace within a 50-mile commuting radius.”
Those employees are exempt from the return to office until the Treasury finds “a safe and comfortable” space for them, the spokesperson said. The IRS employed about 99,000 people as of September, according to the Office of Personnel Management.
A spokesperson for DOGE did not respond to a request for comment.
‘The opposite of efficiency’
President Donald Trump has said that federal employees working remotely are “not very productive” and “most of the time they’re not working.” He’s not alone: JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has said that employees working remotely are “not paying attention.” (Some research has found that RTO policies don’t necessarily spur productivity and can sometimes stifle innovation.)
In late February, the IRS sent an email saying all employees within 50 miles of an office were required to return to in-person work five days a week. The email, viewed by BI, added that all remote work agreements would be canceled.
“Working together in-person with one’s team fosters meaningful collaboration, mentorship, and comradery,” the email said.
Workers returned to the office on March 10. One employee told BI when they showed up to their assigned workspace, another worker was sitting there, leaving them to work out of a conference room all week. They said the WiFi was “absolutely horrible,” and calls kept dropping. When a cubicle finally opened up, there wasn’t any office equipment, they said.
“All day I was trying to get a monitor, docking station, and keys for all the locks,” the employee said, “a complete waste of time and the opposite of efficiency.”
Efficiency challenges at the IRS aren’t new. BI reported in 2022 that a local IRS office in Austin had a cafeteria stuffed with boxes filled with paper returns while the agency grappled with backlogs from understaffing.
Several employees who spoke with BI were concerned about taxpayer security because of what they described as substandard working conditions. They said that while protecting taxpayer information is prioritized in training sessions, returning to the office presents some risks that weren’t prevalent before COVID-19. Because some employees were given the option of telework at the time, fewer people were in the office. Now, that option is gone.
“Employees aren’t allowed to see taxpayer data that they haven’t been assigned,” one IRS worker said. “That takes finesse if you’re in a conference room with 10 to 15 other people.”
Taxpayer privacy and security are “drilled into every employee,” the worker said, and they’re baked into the agency’s institutional culture — not to mention its legal responsibilities.
“We are currently in an environment with heightened risks to taxpayer privacy,” Brandon DeBot, policy director at New York University’s Tax Law Center, said in an email.
DeBot said several factors present risks, including “DOGE affiliates’ unprecedented and extraordinarily broad requests for access to tax data; large-scale layoffs of IRS employees; and the removal and replacement of top IRS personnel.”
‘Nothing is going to get the public more pissed off’
An IRS employee told BI that former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which increased IRS funding to mitigate staffing issues, would continue to support the agency in carrying out its responsibilities during tax season.
In a February email, the IRS told employees that it would retain staff critical to the tax filing season as it underwent workforce reductions. As one employee put it, “Nothing is going to get the public more pissed off” than cutting resources during tax season.
Another employee said they felt that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent “is smart in that he won’t heavily affect taxpayer-facing positions or positions that carry out critical processes like returns.”
The Treasury Department announced its second deferred-resignation offer to agency employees on April 7. The email announcing the offer, viewed by BI, said some employees were deemed “mission critical” and ineligible to participate.
Still, the IRS fired about 7,000 probationary employees in February before the RTO mandate went into effect, and another round of workforce reductions at the agency is expected in the coming weeks.
Top staffers have also left the IRS over the past three months, which has added to the chaos. The Treasury Department confirmed to BI that Melanie Krause, the acting commissioner, is leaving the agency as early as May 15.
For those who remain, the RTO would likely make things more difficult as agency work picked up.
“Half my team works in other states, so being in an office doesn’t facilitate collaboration with them,” one employee said. “The office is unfit for work in a whole lot of ways.”
The employee added that their workstation was near a worker who didn’t have a headset, which meant listening to their coworker’s conference call for an hour. They added that some of the workstations had items left behind by former employees — both personal items and old work documents — and that, at one point, there were “hundreds of storage boxes full of paper documents” lining the halls by some cubicles.
Workers were told not to bring personal equipment into the office — only IRS-distributed equipment, per an email reviewed by BI.
“None of this is to drive efficiency or productivity,” one employee said, “or the ever-popular word used for every RTO mandate, which is collaboration.”
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