The Internal Revenue Service will reorganize its senior ranks days before this year’s tax filing season opens and try to use technology to become more efficient, the Trump administration’s IRS leader Frank Bisignano told The Washington Post on Tuesday.
Administration officials named Bisignano the IRS’s chief executive, a role that does not formally exist in the agency’s governing structure, in October. He also serves as commissioner of the Social Security Administration, which means he manages more than 120,000 employees responsible for collecting roughly $5 trillion in annual revenue and disbursing close to $1.5 trillion in benefits.
Before Bisignano arrived at the IRS, the agency went through six leaders — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent still retains the title of interim IRS commissioner — and saw more than 25,000 employees leave through layoffs, buyouts and retirements. The agency had seen an influx of $80 billion from the Biden administration’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Congress has since revoked more than half of those funds.
Bisignano said the tax service was well-positioned ahead of the coming filing season but needed to more aggressively lean into technology, including initiatives pushed by the now-defunct U.S. DOGE Service to reduce staffing.
“We’re constantly investing in technology. We constantly must reap the rewards of it. And quite often we don’t, because someone isn’t willing to let go of those two people,” he said. “ … I’m not at all feeling that we don’t have enough staff. I just think it’s a way people think that is obsolete.”
The first year of Trump’s term shook the foundations of the IRS. To search for benefits fraud, DOGE operatives attempted to gain access to a confidential database that held detailed tax information on every person, business and nonprofit in the country. DOGE eventually was granted anonymized access to the system.
Bessent signed an agreement with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem to share sensitive tax information on individuals the Trump administration suspected of being in the country illegally. In November, a federal judge blocked the arrangement, holding that it violated taxpayers’ rights to privacy.
Bisignano on Tuesday unveiled a new leadership team at the agency that will see 16 C-suite executives report to him, including a new chief of criminal investigations and the IRS’s acting chief counsel.
The agency will jettison its former standards that measured and tracked performance on taxpayer helplines. Bisignano said previous metrics that tracked access to customer assistance representatives were opaque and distracted from the agency’s mission of helping solve taxpayers’ problems. It will instead gauge average speed of answer at call centers, call abandonment rate and time spent on the line, he said.
“At the heart of this vision is a digital-first taxpayer experience, complemented by a strong human touch wherever it is needed,” Bisignano wrote in an all-staff memo reviewed by The Post.
The IRS will continue to work on two DOGE-era initiatives for this filing season, which begins Jan. 26. The agency will pursue a shortcut to connect dozens of disparate internal data systems, ditching a Biden-era plan to overhaul much of its legacy technological mainframe.
The agency will also outsource some of its paper return processing operations, including using private contractors to scan and digitize tax returns. The IRS has long been burdened by paper processing. Hard copy returns make up a fraction of the agency’s correspondence, but they take exponentially longer to process than returns filed electronically.
DOGE officials had pitched fully privatizing those initiatives. Bisignano said the IRS would have a “hybrid” public-private digitalization process, saying he was wary of outsourcing too much of that work.
“I’m fundamentally DOGE,” Bisignano said, “and what I’ve meant by that is I’ve driven efficiency and quality my whole career.”
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