Inside the IRS
The IRS unit that audits billionaires has lost 38% of its employees since January, new data shows
As Donald Trump and Elon Musk take a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy, the cuts at the IRS may be especially good news for America’s wealthiest taxpayers.
The IRS’s unit that audits billionaires and other ultrawealthy individuals has lost 38% of its employees this year amid the Trump administration’s slashing of the federal workforce, according to new data obtained by ICIJ. The office, known as Global High Wealth, employed 353 people before the cuts and has experienced a far higher rate of terminations compared to the IRS as a whole, the data shows.
The unit’s losses have left behind unfinished audits of ultrawealthy individuals and cases that have either stalled or are being closed, according to four current revenue agents within the high-wealth office. The agents spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
The losses are a big reversal for the IRS’s recent effort to step up its tax enforcement among the wealthiest Americans, who authorities say account for a disproportionately high share of tax cheating. Under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, Congress allocated the IRS $80 billion in additional funding, in part to strengthen its efforts to audit wealthy individuals and large corporations. However, Congressional Republicans have clawed back half of that funding, while the IRS has become a central target of the Trump administration’s cost-cutting effort led by billionaire Elon Musk.
Earlier this year, the IRS had roughly 100,000 employees overall. Last month, the Trump administration terminated more than 7,000 IRS probationary staff members across the agency. The IRS also reportedly lost another 4,000 or 5,000 workers, who took the administration’s much-publicized buyout offer.
Although a federal court earlier this month ordered the Treasury Department to reinstate the fired workers, the IRS put those employees on administrative leave.
The IRS did not reply to requests to comment for this story.
The Global High Wealth unit is a relatively small IRS office — now composed of 220 employees — and is a destination for highly experienced agents. The unit is tasked with some of the agency’s hardest work: auditing individuals whose income or assets reach into the tens of millions of dollars and beyond. The unit appears to have been hit particularly hard by last month’s terminations because it had been a hiring priority under the Biden administration and had a large share of newer employees who were still on probationary status, the new data shows.
The agents in that office must sometimes untangle intricate tax-dodging structures that white-shoe attorneys and major accounting firms create for wealthy individuals and the investment firms that cater to them. As a result, the previous administration emphasized hiring seasoned experts and many of the terminated probationary employees had decades of experience in sophisticated areas of tax law.
“These are the agents who give the government the biggest bang for its buck,” Duncan Giles, President of National Treasury Employees Union’s Chapter 49, said of the Global High Wealth unit. “They’re the ones making millions or tens of millions, and in some cases hundreds of millions, in tax adjustments, so that’s less money coming into the treasury.”
According to the new data, which ICIJ obtained through a records request, employees who took the administration’s deferred resignation offer accounted for roughly 13% of the losses in the high wealth unit, while terminations of probationary workers made up the rest.
The data also shows big overall losses in the high wealth unit’s parent office, known as the Pass-Through Entities Practice Area, named after a type of financial vehicle common in high-end tax cheating. So-called pass-through entities like LLCs and trusts pass on income, liabilities and tax responsibilities to individual investors. Well-heeled taxpayers have increasingly routed their wealth into massively complex webs of pass-throughs that can obscure financial flows and stump auditors.
The new IRS data shows that the Pass-Through Entities office — including the high-wealth unit — has lost a total of 27% of its workforce so far this year. Earlier this month, ICIJ reported on cases that were on the verge of closure across the IRS’s Large Business and International Division. The division oversees both the high-wealth unit and pass-through office and is responsible for auditing corporations, investment partnerships and ultrawealthy individuals.
Current agents in the high-wealth unit described their teams as being in a state of near paralysis as management contends with lost agents, stray audits, and uncertainty over the Trump administration’s talk of additional layoffs. Several current and former agents said that the loss of so many agents will likely force some teams in the high- wealth unit to be consolidated.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen,“ said one current agent in the high-wealth office. “It’s a lucky day for some taxpayers who owe hundreds of thousands or millions to the government.”