Five Questions for IRS CEO Frank Bisignano

The IRS has a new leader – maybe he can tell us whats happening

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As the Internal Revenue Service gears up for tax season, there are reasons to worry. The agency has lost over three-fourths of its senior leadership and a quarter of its entire workforce. Traditionally helmed by a Senate-confirmed Commissioner for a five-year term, the IRS has been led by an unprecedented seven individuals this year. Can this battered, depleted agency continue to provide effective, timely, independent, and nonpartisan tax administration?

The stakes are high. The IRS was responsible for collecting $5 trillion in revenue in 2024. The agency received about 160 million individual income tax returns and issued around 100 million refunds, with an average refund of about $3,000. Those dollars represent essential funds for lower-income households, many of whom are already bearing the burden of higher prices and the illegal withholding of SNAP benefits this fall. If the IRS falters, millions of Americans will feel real economic pain.

Reliable revenue is also a prerequisite for a functioning government. As Vanessa details in her new book, The Price of Democracy, opponents of democracy in the United States, from slaveholders to Gilded Age oligarchs to the contemporary Republican party, have adopted a dual strategy of electoral and fiscal subversion – on the one hand, trying to keep their political opponents from voting, and on the other, ensuring that the government is too starved of revenue to invest in egalitarian policies or restrain private power. The assault on the IRS is not some minor skirmish in the battle for democratic governance and the rule of law. It is the front line.

Oversight of the IRS is therefore more critical than ever. Last month, Treasury Secretary (and acting IRS Commissioner) Scott Bessent announced that Frank Bisignano, in a newly created role as “CEO,” would be taking on the day-to-day operations at the tax agency. It is difficult to imagine that Bisignano can give the IRS his full attention, given that he is also the commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Nonetheless, to the extent the buck stops with anyone, Bisignano is leading the agency.

Here are the five questions that government watchdogs should be asking Bisignano as we gear up for tax season 2026.

1) How many people work at the IRS?

A seemingly straightforward question, but the answer is far from obvious.

Like other agencies, the IRS saw its staffing slashed this year, via processes so chaotic and disrespectful that thousands of skilled and dedicated employees fled the agency. IRS employees mostly have been pushed out through multiple interlocking strategies: the attempted firing of “probationary employees” (~7,000 employees); deferred resignations, voluntary early retirements and buyouts (~22,000 employees); and finally, attempted layoffs known as Reductions in Force (~1,700 employees, mostly during the shutdown). Another 3,000 employees left the agency this year outside of these pathways.

So what is the sum total? Unclear. Data on expected IRS workforce levels as of May were released by the Taxpayer Advocate Service; IRS staffing was projected to fall from 102,000 to 76,000 – a 26% decrease. Unofficial trackers, including Partnership for Public Service, have identified about 32,000 departures from the Treasury Department. The Treasury Department’s shutdown plans offered another window into the total staffing of the IRS, suggesting 74,299 employees as of September.

Further complicating the staffing picture, many employees have spent much of this year in limbo. Because of lawsuits and under the terms of the deferred resignation program, thousands of employees have spent long periods on administrative leave, being paid but not allowed to work. An unknown number of exiting employees were asked to return.

As if this were not enough uncertainty, there is the added question of the shutdown. The IRS furloughed about half of its staff. The agency has since backtracked on a promise that furloughed workers would receive back pay, though withholding pay would clearly be illegal — a decision that will surely push even more IRS employees to the exit.

So the first question for Bisignano is how many people are employed by the IRS, in total, by job function and division, and how many of those people are being allowed to work. Budget hawks would presumably also be interested to know how much IRS employees have been paid for time when they were barred from working – a question that certainly should be put to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration or the GAO.

But even more urgent is the question of the work not done, and the consequences for taxpayers. Which brings us to our next question:

2) What are the implications for IRS services during the 2026 tax season?

IRS Taxpayer Services lost over 9,000 employees, more than a fifth of its workforce, this year. That’s a lot fewer people to answer phones and process paperwork. Adding to the pressure is the need for new IRS publications, systems, and training to account for the tax law changes in H.R.1: The One Big Beautiful Bill Act -- some provisions of which raise significant implementation questions.

As a result, tax season may well begin later than the usual, delaying refunds for regular taxpayers. In July, then-Commissioner Billy Long suggested that the season would start around mid-February rather than late January. The IRS quickly backtracked. But if the agency was already running weeks behind before the government shutdown, a delay seems even more likely now.

The next issue is how the IRS responds to taxpayer needs. Without restaffing, the predicted filing season “level of service” (a measure of how many calls to the IRS are answered) will plummet from 87% in 2025 to 16% in 2026, Treasury has admitted in budget documents seeking 11,000 additional hires this fall.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has suggested that staffing losses could delay refunds, cause $360 million in fraudulent refunds to be disbursed, and prevent 169,000 fewer taxpayers from receiving in-person assistance.

Watchdogs should be asking now about how many customer service representatives are on staff, and how many have been hired and trained this year compared to last year at this time. During the tax season, the key service metrics will include call wait times, the level of service, the measures of paperwork backlogs known as “inventories,” and the metrics gauging assistance to potential identity theft victims.

Observers will need to keep a skeptical eye on the answers they receive. After agency performance dropped, the Social Security Administration under Commissioner Bisignano cited misleading performance statistics and stopped reporting key metrics like wait times.

3) What has happened to audits for the very richest taxpayers?

Investigative reporting suggests that audits of the wealthiest taxpayers, a priority under President Biden, are being abandoned or closed because there is simply no one left to do the work.

One might think that fewer auditors and government lawyers is all upside for taxpayers. It’s certainly the case that an underfunded IRS is a field day for unscrupulous taxpayers with the kind of income that’s easy to hide. But lower-quality enforcement is bad news for honest taxpayers, who will find their audits left in limbo and court cases delayed, and their questions unanswered. And cuts to the portion of the IRS that is equipped to take on challenging tax evaluations will mean that audit rates are shifted off the rich and onto poorer people and, disproportionately, Black families.

Those interested in assessing the enforcement capacity of the IRS should determine how many staff are still working in enforcement, especially the Pass-Through Entities Practice Area, including the Global High Wealth unit and Pass-Through Examinations. They should also ask about audits opened and closed this year, and the income distribution of those taxpayers being audited.

Another crucial question is the impact on revenue. A collapse in the IRS’s capacity to audit higher-earners will certainly increase the $700 billion annual “tax gap” — the difference between tax money owed and tax money paid voluntarily and on time. Three fifths of that shortfall is due to underreporting of income by the top ten percent of earners; an additional dollar spent auditing these earners returns an estimated $12 in revenue. The damage to enforcement capacity this year is so unprecedented, it is hard to predict the cost. But one model has suggested that, over a decade, it could reduce revenue by about two hundred billion dollars.

4) How has IRS-Criminal Investigations been diverted from its mission, either through politicization or re-assignment to immigration enforcement?

IRS Criminal Investigations (IRS-CI) are, most famously, the people who caught Al Capone. They are the small portion of the agency that investigates serious criminal matters, including tax evasion, financial crimes, money laundering schemes, and cybercrimes.

Data received by the Cato Institute indicates that 1,771 IRS personnel were diverted to immigration enforcement in August. If all those diverted came specifically from among IRS special agents, i.e. the agency’s law enforcement officers, that would leave about a quarter of IRS-CI agents doing their actual jobs. Great news for the nation’s money launderers.

It is unclear precisely what diverted IRS-CI agents are doing. An unknown number of IRS-CI agents were involved in Trump’s attempted takeover of Washington’s local police. Men in IRS-CI vests have been seen at Metro stops in the Washington DC area, apparently working to catch riders evading a $2 Metro fare. IRS-CI also reportedly participated in a military-style raid against street vendors on New York City’s Canal Street.

The public deserves to know how many IRS law enforcement officers are still doing IRS-CI work, how many IRS special agents have been reassigned, what kinds of cases they were working before being detailed to ICE, and what work they are now doing instead.

A second concern is the potential politicization of IRS-CI. President Trump has long expressed a desire to use the tax system to punish his perceived enemies and has explicitly threatened the tax-exempt status of organizations that he disfavors. Recent reporting from the Wall Street Journal suggests an effort is underway within the agency to enact the Administration’s politicization agenda. If, as this news suggests, the longtime head of Criminal Investigations is removed and replaced with a political ally of the Trump administration, it will be critical to investigate that firing, including by demanding all communications and other documentation associated with the leadership change.

More broadly, watchdogs should be asking about political attempts to influence IRS employees. The protocol for IRS employees facing political pressure is to inform the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, as at least one IRS official did after receiving an email from a Treasury official about the audit of “a high-profile friend of the President.” So how many complaints has TIGTA received from IRS employees about political interference?

5) What do we know about data consolidation and taxpayer privacy?

In April, news broke of a reported “hackathon” at the IRS involving DOGE, Palantir representatives, and IRS engineers to build a new interface to access IRS records. The possibility of data exfiltration and consolidation has worried privacy experts, especially in light of serious lapses in data security during DOGE’s involvement in other agencies. The administration is also trying to extract millions of taxpayers’ data for its mass deportation campaign, despite the objections of numerous IRS leaders, including some once seen as Administration allies. (So far, the IRS has shared about 47,000 records out of 1.3 million records requested, and a court order requires the court to be informed if the IRS receives another request or plans to share more information with DHS/ICE.)

In September, IRS began a $14.2 million contract with Palantir to build a unified API, but little is known about the process by which this contract was awarded or what protections are in place for taxpayer data.

Senators Wyden and Warren, among other lawmakers, have been asking key questions about taxpayer data and privacy protections at the IRS, as well as Palantir’s reported data projects at the IRS. But there are many outstanding issues, including: given DOGE’s promotion of Palantir, have standard procurement procedures continued to be upheld at the IRS? For example, has the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration received complaints about projects being formulated outside of fair competition rules and without adequate oversight?

Over the months to come, we will continue to press for answers to these and other critical questions about the functioning of the IRS. This winter, we will be launching a new data portal at Brookings, the “IRS Spotlight,” that will track, preserve and assess IRS performance data as the 2026 tax season unfolds. Repairing our federal tax capacity is essential to rebuilding democracy and the rule of law. The first step is knowing what has been broken.

Vanessa Williamson is the author of the new book, The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History. She is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, and a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

Ellis Chen is a senior research assistant in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution.

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