The IRS recently announced that this year’s tax filing season will open on January 26, 2026. Ahead of tax season, we are proud to announce the launch of a new resource.
The IRS Spotlight provides researchers, journalists, and the public with regularly updated and accessible data and analysis regarding federal tax administration.
Want to know more about call wait times at the IRS? Curious about leadership turnover at the agency? Interested in the latest public documents from the lawsuits over IRS-ICE data sharing? We’ve got you covered.
The IRS Spotlight examines six key areas of tax administration:
- Leadership and workforce
- Tax compliance and enforcement
- Taxpayer services
- Immigration
- Paperwork processing
- Data and modernization
We have extracted and compiled years of data from the IRS, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, and the Taxpayer Advocate, among other sources. But the Spotlight does not just include official datasets and reports: On issues from enforcement to privacy, the Spotlight provides an easy-to-follow collection of work by journalists, research institutions, and good-governance advocates.
The IRS Spotlight is all-the-more important because of the immense changes we’ve seen at the agency this year.
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: the IRS workforce has been gutted. The agency has shed at least a quarter of its employees. Half of the remaining staff were furloughed for five weeks during the shutdown, even as the agency was tasked with implementing complicated tax provisions in OBBBA. The agency is also experiencing an unprecedented leadership vacuum, with a total of seven people serving as the IRS commissioner last year and three–quarters of its top civil servants departing.
The full implications of these cuts are yet to be seen–and, unfortunately, we cannot even be confident that the public will have timely information about this tax season. In 2025, amid rising wait times, the Social Security Administration removed performance metrics from its public website. Later in the year, the website for the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration–which houses hundreds of reports on IRS performance–went offline because the administration refused to disburse congressionally appropriated funds.
The IRS Spotlight ensures that existing public data about tax administration will remain accessible. We will continue updating and expanding the Spotlight in the weeks and months to come. If you find a gap in our data library, or have a resource you think should be included, please reach out to us at [email protected].
Authors
The IRS Spotlight © 2025 by The Brookings Institution is licensed under CC BY 4.0
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Commentary
Introducing the IRS Spotlight
January 15, 2026