Is the IRS just between shutdowns? Former IRS commissioners are worried

The IRS just came out of the longest government shutdown, but the deal that ended the stalemate funds the agency only through Jan. 30, just as filing season is about to begin. And that’s a concern for taxpayers and tax practitioners, two former IRS commissioners told reporters Tuesday at the 2025 AICPA National Tax Conference.

“It would be, I think, disaster to do it again on Jan. 31,” said John Koskinen, the IRS commissioner from 2013–2017 and deputy director of management for the Office of Management and Budget during the three-week partial government shutdown in 1995–1996. “At this point, the support structure is going to be shut down. And it just, I mean, you can’t imagine a worse time to have a shutdown than the end of January.”

Koskinen and Danny Werfel, who served as commissioner from March 2023 to January 2025, spoke with reporters after they joined former Acting Commissioner Doug O’Donnell in a conference session titled “Insider Insights: A Conversation With Former IRS Commissioners & the National Taxpayer Advocate Update.”

If the government does shut down at the end of January, it will be “important more than ever to have good transparency with all the stakeholders — obviously, the tax-filing public, the preparers, the lawyers, the accountants,” Werfel said. “In that moment of heavy transaction between the government and the citizens in a shutdown, it really raises the stakes to be even more crystal clear on what is open and what is not.”

The IRS used money from the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, P.L. 117-169, to fund certain operations during the most recent shutdown. It’s not clear how much of that funding remains, Werfel said, for IRS operations during a shutdown that coincides with filing season.

Koskinen and Werfel both said that the IRS, which has had seven acting or confirmed commissioners in 2025, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in the acting role now, needs leadership stability in order to provide the best service to the public.

The presentation to conference attendees was a question-and-answer session led by Melanie Lauridsen, the AICPA’s vice president–Tax Policy & Advocacy.

As the IRS prepares for the next filing season, it has lost 25% of its workforce in the midst of preparing technology and guidance for H.R. 1, P.L. 119-21, commonly known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, O’Donnell reminded conference attendees.

“This year is particularly complicated,” because of H.R. 1, O’Donnell said. The new law, he said, “creates a lot of challenges for tens of millions of individuals, as you all know, but there are some provisions in there that I expect are going to raise taxpayer demand, tax professional demand, for IRS help, and it’s going to be very difficult for the [IRS] to have worked through this period and be ready for it, I think. I hope I’m wrong.”

National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins, who spoke at the conference after the former commissioners, noted that her office, the Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS), was shuttered during the shutdown. Its employees have returned with a renewed zeal, she said.

“They are seemingly very happy to be back, to have a job and to be working for the taxpayers,” she said. But with roughly 5,000 new cases streaming in weekly, returning TAS to an even keel will require patience from practitioners and taxpayers, she said.

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