When the IRS reassigned around 1,500 employees with no relevant experience to help process tax returns, the agency said the moves would help provide “the best possible experience for taxpayers.”
Months later, after extensive training and failed exams, the IRS is abandoning the efforts.
The employees will now be transferred again, this time to a new internal consulting office. Joe Ziegler, the official the Trump administration promoted after he alleged to Congress the IRS had mishandled Hunter Biden’s taxes, is behind the new job assignments.
Ziegler spearheaded the first round of employee reshuffling, which sent IT and human resources staff into the Taxpayer Services office. After giving up on that idea — few employees were ever actually processing returns and none did so during peak tax season — Ziegler is placing the staff onto new teams without any indication of what work they will perform, according to several workers impacted by the changes.
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The whipsaw has sparked fear and panic among IRS staff. It also shows the remarkable responsibility placed in an untested leader as the agency continues to reshape itself after pushing out tens of thousands of employees.
In another unusual twist, senior executives the IRS sidelined in early 2025 and kept on paid leave for nearly a year and a half have been called back to lead these consulting teams. The agency recalled the executives to work in recent weeks without explaining to them why they were pushed out or suddenly called back.
“Nothing has been assigned yet,” one impacted worker who requested anonymity because of their current employment said. “People are asking questions, but no one is being given answers.” The IRS employee added that management is “just doing whatever they want and forcing people to fight it.”
The agency placed around 50 career IT executives on leave in March 2025, causing speculation that the IRS was trying to ease information sharing with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Only a handful of those executives will return to help lead the new teams; many others have accepted settlement agreements to leave the government.
IRS has assigned employees to one of three divisions within the internal consulting office, with one formerly sidelined senior executive leading each. What functions those divisions will carry out remains a mystery. The fraction of reassigned employees who passed their certification exams were also provided an option to voluntarily remain in their Taxpayer Services role.
Employees have pushed leadership for more details on their fate, though at least one supervisor has told them they would need to submit a Freedom of Information Act request to receive it. Some of those FOIA requests have already been denied, one employee said.
The roughly 1,000 originally reassigned IT employees are prohibited from returning to their old roles, according to employees and internal communications viewed by The Washington Sun. Some have expressed concern the agency will eventually lay them off.
Most of the roughly 500 HR employees who were reassigned have returned to the human capital office.
For now, Ziegler is telling the former IT staff only that the new assignments will boost agency consistency. He told employees he was implementing a Reporting and Organizational Correction that will “allow us to operate with a single, authoritative source of organizational truth.”
The IRS has shed around 25,000 employees — about a quarter of its workforce — since President Donald Trump took office, mostly by offering incentives for staff to leave. More than 8,000 of the departed employees worked in processing tax returns, providing customer service by phone or in person, or in other roles directly related to filing season. The agency had hoped the reassignments would help stabilize its most public-facing operations in the wake of those cuts.
Before abandoning the effort, officials had suggested to employees the tax processing assignments would last as long as it took to bring down backlogs that had been in place for years. A large percentage of the employees never passed the necessary certification exams to conduct the work, however.
Around 150 employees originally reassigned to tax processing have spent extended time being paid not to work —some for more than a year — according to employees and internal emails. Those workers will now join the new teams with to-be-determined roles. In messages to that group, leadership had taken to referring to those employees as “outcasts.”
Some of those employees saw the new assignment as a step in a positive direction.
“I’m just glad to have something to do,” one staffer said.
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