I.R.S. Fires 6,700 Employees Amid Tax Filing Season

The Trump administration started firing about 6,700 employees at the Internal Revenue Service on Thursday, according to people familiar with the matter, extending its cost-cutting measures to the federal agency responsible for collecting tax revenue from millions of Americans.The job cuts at the I.R.S.are hitting probationary employees who were recently hired around the country.

More than 5,000 of those workers are part of the agency’s compliance teams, which deal with auditing and collections.The layoffs are coming a week during tax filing season, when the I.R.S.

will be inundated with paperwork and questions from taxpayers.The I.R.S.employs about 100,000 accountants, lawyers and other staff across the country.

The Biden administration was in the process of beefing up enforcement and modernizing the agency with an $80 billion investment, but President Trump wants to curb its powers and has dispatched Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency to scrutinize its computer systems.A spokeswoman for the I.R.S.declined to provide an exact number for the layoffs, which some people familiar with the matter could be as low as 6,000 or as high as 7,000.

The people were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the situation.Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said on Thursday that the layoffs are “absolutely on the table for good reasons” and that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent believes that the agency could afford to lose more than 3,500 people.Asked if the I.R.S.employees were being let go because of poor performance, Mr.

Hassett said, “Our objective is to make sure that the employees that we pay are being productive and effective and there are more than 100,000 people working to collect taxes and not all of them are fully occupied.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience whil...