IRS staff cuts could put burden on practitioners to explain OBBBA

Staff cuts at the IRS could mean tax professionals become more responsible for explaining the provisions of H.R. 1, P.L. 119-21, commonly known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), a former IRS communications chief said during AICPA Town Hall last week.

Taxpayer Services, Information Technology, and the Communications and Liaison (CNL) teams have all experienced staff cuts since President Donald Trump took office, said Terry Lemons, former CNL chief for the IRS.

CNL tasks include writing news releases, handling social media, and doing outreach to local tax professional groups, he said. Some 44% of staffers have been cut, Lemons said, including some of the most senior staff.

“That’s going to be an added challenge for the agency to get out enough communication,” Lemons said. “What I really think is going to happen here is that there’s going to be added burden on the tax professional community to help educate clients and taxpayers about what this bill really means because I think you’ll see less communication coming out of the IRS with these staff cuts.”

That dearth of information leaves the potential for false information to spread via social media, as has already happened with the issue of taxability of tips, he said. “So, for me, that’s an area to watch out for. And tax pros need to be ready. They’re going to have to do more education on their own,” Lemons said.

Lemons, who spent more than 26 years at the IRS in a variety of communications roles, noted that 25,000 employees have left the IRS since February, and Congress has filed bills to legislate further job cuts. All those people are leaving as the IRS must implement H.R. 1, a massive law with more changes than the IRS has handled in several years, he said.

A July 18 report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that 25,386 employees left the IRS as of May 2025 through some sort of incentive program such as deferred resignation. Another 294 employees received reduction-in-force notices but have not been terminated because of a court injunction, as is the case for 3,023 probationary employees. These employees continue to work at the IRS unless they choose to separate or are terminated for other reasons, the report said.

Despite those staff cuts, some events work in favor of the IRS and taxpayers, including that H.R. 1 became law in July rather than in November or December, Lemons said. In addition, the IRS gets started on implementing changes even before a bill becomes law, as it did in 2021 with a third round of stimulus payments, he said.

Lemons stressed that while he would not underestimate the IRS, he expressed concerns about the effect of staff cuts when combined with the changes required by H.R. 1.

H.R. 1 “is going to require a lot of changes across really the whole swath of IRS operations,” he said. “It’s going to require updates to programming that the IT folks do. It’s going to require additional information being shared out through legal guidance, website, and news releases.”

Implementing the parts of 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, P.L. 115-97, that were extended or revised will be “relatively easy” for the IRS, Lemons said. “What’s more complicated are making the kinds of changes that you have with things like the tips, Social Security changes, the overtime. … That’s where there’s a lot of new programming that’s required. And those things just don’t appear out of nowhere. You’ve got to have counsel looking at it. You’ve got to have programmers getting information from the experts in Taxpayer Services, to get all that information right, and they then have to build it into the system. It’s a heavy lift, and people don’t realize that.”

— To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Martha Waggoner at Martha.Waggoner@aicpa-cima.com.