- From FY2024 to FY2025, the IRS saw a nearly $5 billion decline in enforcement revenue, primarily due to a decline in revenue from tax examinations.
- The IRS has lost more than 30% of its revenue agents. The Civil Division Tax Litigation branch of the Department of Justice has seen a 30% to 40% decline in staffing.
- In 2025 and early 2026, around 250 IRS-Criminal Investigations (IRS-CI) agents at a time were temporarily diverted to immigration enforcement.
DATA IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Data highlights:
The Internal Revenue Service collects about trillions of dollars in revenues annually. By the late 2010s, however, chronic underfunding had seriously eroded the capacity of the IRS to enforce the tax laws, particularly for those at the top of the economic distribution. “Millionaires in 2018 were about 80% less likely to be audited than they were in 2011,” a ProPublica report found. The audit rate for large partnerships, a “pass-through” business structure common in venture capital and private equity, collapsed from 2.7%to less than 0.1%, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). The IRS estimated the gross “tax gap,” taxes that are legally owed but not paid voluntarily and on time, at $696 billion in tax year 2022.
In 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) allotted an additional $80 billion to the IRS, $46 billion of which was earmarked to strengthen enforcement. By September 2024, new IRS enforcement initiatives had recovered $1.3 billion from high-income and high-wealth individuals. Using IRA funds, the IRS also opened examinations of 76 of the largest U.S. partnerships and launched an initiative covering more than 125,000 cases of high-income taxpayers who did not file tax returns. The investment in IRS enforcement helped “uncover a whole new family of aggressive tax shelters,” reported the New York Times, “that the Treasury estimated was costing the public at least $100 billion over a decade.”
Scroll down for a timeline of the changes to tax enforcement since January 2025 ↓
You can also download a spreadsheet with the full list of available data, including the range of years for which data is available.
The IRS Spotlight © 2025 by The Brookings Institution is licensed under CC BY 4.0