Early in August 2022, The US Senate passed a tax reform & spending budget bill that allocates $80 Billion to IRS. News of IRS will go on a hiring spree of 87000 employees started to run around, and even Elon Musk made fun of it.
First of all, here two important facts about the IRS hiring plans:
- IRS will make those hires spread throughout 2022 to 2031.
- 87,000 is not the number of new employees to be hired, it also includes replacement hires as well.
While the IRS commissioner Charles Rettig explained that these hiring plans are not about increasing audits on small business and middle-income Americans in his letter to the senate, there are already a lot of rumors in media outlets about how the newly hired tax agents will come after middle-class Americans and they won’t go after billionaires. Well, this is out of our scope 🙂 In this blog post, we won’t be touching any of those, rather we’ll look at the opportunities it may bring to potential job seekers and candidates who may want to pursue a career in IRS.
Current IRS Workforce
As reported by IRS on its website, IRS used 78,661 FTE positions to conduct its operations. So 87,000 new employment opportunities is a big number. Out of all FTEs, 64.7% of them were women. When you consider the teams related with budget activities, 31k works in Examination and Collections, 28k in Filing and Account Services, 7k in information services, 5k in support Services, 4.6k in Education and 3k in the Investigations department.
From a non-budget activity point of view, IRS employs 15k people for Customer Service, 8k for seasonal operations, 2k special agents and 1.5k attorneys (data: IRS Personnel Summary Sheet).
As of August 12th, IRS has about 250 job openings on its career website and we expect a surge in those numbers in the following months. While the majority of those roles will be about finance / tax / audit roles, we expect a lot of openings for roles not directly related to finance. A quick search on the IRS website shows that hiring Project Managers and Management/Program Analysts are a high priority for IRS as well.
Working at IRS
Founded in 1862, Internal Revenue Services is widely regarded as a school for tax and audit related professionals. While public service positions are not for everyone, many people who works at IRS mention pay and benefits as one of the positive sides. Some other benefits of working at IRS may be listed as follows:
- Location versatility
- Robust training programs
- Wide variety of job opportunities
- Competitive wages
Which roles to look out for?
We expect more of the following roles to be opened for employment in the IRS website soon, so we suggest you to be on the lookout for these (don’t forget to bookmark the IRS Careers website):
- Project Managers
- Customer Service Representatives
- Audit / Tax / Finance Managers
- Analysts
Remember, if you already work for one of the roles above or if you have job interview information about IRS recruitment processes that can help potential candidates to better prepare for their IRS interviews, you can create a job interview support service here at interviewjoy.com in a few minutes and start generating passive income for yourself. See How it Works? page for more details.
Good luck with your job search!
Interviewjoy Team
