The Internal Revenue Service is one of the federal agencies that is being severely impacted by President Donald Trump’s administration’s ongoing, dramatic budget cuts.
With the deadline for paying taxes approaching, Reuters and the New York Times have reported that over 6,000 IRS staff would be let off.
Although early filing during tax season has always been advised by tax experts, this year the advice may be more crucial than ever.
Here are some tips for the 2025 tax filing season, including when to file and how to check the status of your return, while the IRS has laid off thousands of personnel.The IRS is the most recent federal agency to experience significant budget cuts. The Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the National Park Service, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) are among the others.
How could IRS cuts affect the 2025 tax season?
According to several accountants, taxpayers who want help or want quick return checks could suffer greatly from an IRS staffing shortage during tax season. The National Taxpayer Advocate, an independent IRS agency, claims that the IRS already has too few personnel and struggles to hire and retain staff.
Richard Pon, a certified public accountant in San Francisco, told USA TODAY on Wednesday that mass layoffs “definitely will impact tax season as cuts would have immediate impact.”
A worker shortage, he said, may mean:
- Processing facilities won’t have enough employees. Paper return processing, which typically takes six to eight weeks, is particularly impacted by this. He cautioned, “You can see this double, triple, or quadruple.” Additionally, it will take longer than the typical three to four weeks to process paper refund cheques, he said.
- Wait times in customer service lines will increase. “Expect that to get worse with layoffs,” Pon said.
- Since these teams could have to take on additional responsibilities, the four to six months it currently takes to process communications and modified returns could quadruple. In order to fulfill the demands of this filing season, the IRS has stated that they will “reallocate workers from other areas to help cover filing season processing.”
- In a LinkedIn article, former IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said that military members and their spouses would have less work. According to him, military veterans make up over 10% of IRS staff members, including “on probation” new hires. Spouses of active military people also make up a large portion of IRS staff hired to work during filing season.
When is the 2025 tax deadline?
The deadline for this year is set for the customary date of April 15.
Unless April 15 is a weekend or holiday, that day is always Tax Day. It falls on a Tuesday this year.
