The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recently announced that it will hire 470 new revenue agents into the Small Business Self Employed (SB/SE) division. This effort is part of a larger IRS staffing initiative, following a January 2022 announcement that the IRS plans to hire 200 lawyers to assist with litigation efforts, a March 2022 announcement that the IRS plans to hire more than 200 technology specialists and another March 2022 announcement that it would fill more than 5,000 positions in its processing centers in Austin, Texas; Kansas City, Missouri and Ogden, Utah. This latest announcement continues the trend of reversing a decline in enforcement activities to improve taxpayer compliance.

Practice Point: The IRS has lost a tremendous amount of revenue agents over the last 10 years. This new effort to increase the number of personnel was much needed for an already overworked and overburdened agency. We do expect that the IRS will also continue to increase its efforts to ensure that taxpayers are uniformly compliant with the tax laws.