The short answer: The IRS is severely understaffed in collections. In some cities, the number of revenue officers has dropped by over 75%. Cases are sitting for months without anyone touching them. Appeals officers are carrying nearly double their intended caseload. This means delays for everyone — including people trying to resolve things proactively. It also means a wave of collection notices is coming as the IRS releases the backlog it built up during COVID.
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The IRS has lost a significant number of its experienced revenue officers (the people who collect tax after an agent assesses it) through a combination of budget pressures, retirements, and the 2025 workforce reductions. The effects are being felt in specific, measurable ways at the local office level.
"In Las Vegas, there used to be more than 20 revenue officers handling collection. Today there are fewer than five. And the cases don't disappear — they just pile up. Everything goes into ACS [Automated Collection System] and sits in the cloud. We'd much rather push a case to the local office where we can work with a specific person, but there's almost nobody there to push it to."
The same pattern is playing out in appeals. IRS settlement officers are supposed to carry around 50 cases each. Today many are handling 80 to 90. Cases that would normally resolve in 3-4 months are taking 6-12 months. Documents sit at service centers for months without anyone opening them.
"I have a client whose husband passed away. They accidentally double paid their taxes — about $25,000 that should be coming back to them as a refund. I contacted the IRS. Three months went by. Then another three months. I talked to someone yesterday and they said, 'well, I'll put a note in the system, give it 30 days, and if it still doesn't move, call Taxpayer Advocacy.' Nine months. $25,000. Still not issued. Things that used to take 3 months now take 6. Things that took 6 months can take a year."
During COVID, the IRS deliberately held back collection notices to avoid overwhelming their phone systems and to give struggling taxpayers relief. Tens of millions of notices were essentially frozen. As staffing allows, the IRS has been releasing them — and practitioners who watch this closely say another large wave is coming.
"The IRS was holding millions of letters during COVID because they didn't want to flood the system with calls. They've been releasing them slowly. In the last six or seven months we've seen flooding in collection activity — and there's another wave that's coming. If you owe money from 2020, 2021, 2022 and you haven't heard from the IRS recently, that doesn't mean they forgot. It means they haven't gotten to you yet."
What this means practically: if you owe money and haven't heard from the IRS in a while, don't assume the problem went away. Your account may have just been sitting in ACS waiting for someone to touch it. Getting ahead of this — proactively filing returns, getting on a payment plan, or resolving the issue — is significantly easier before the IRS's system gets to you than after.
IRS delays have created at least one unintended advantage for taxpayers who know how to use it. In the appeals process, when a collection case is referred to the Independent Office of Appeals, the collection division is supposed to respond to certain requests within 45 days.
"We had a case where we were waiting six months for collection to review the financials. Nothing happened. I found in the IRS manual that if collection doesn't reply to the appeals officer within 45 days, the appeals officer has the right to analyze the financials themselves. The officer wasn't happy about it, but since it's in the manual, he had to do it. We essentially forced the case to close by citing the internal deadline that collection had already missed."
This isn't a trick — it's a procedural protection in the IRS's own Internal Revenue Manual. Practitioners who know the manual can enforce these timelines even when the IRS's internal workflow has broken down due to staffing shortages.
One concrete policy change that affects all taxpayers interacting with the IRS right now: the agency is moving to require all tax payments to be made electronically through IRS.gov. Paper checks still work in many situations, but the IRS is actively pushing toward an all-electronic system.
The practical implication: if you're responding to any notice with a payment — a CP14 balance, an installment agreement payment, quarterly estimated taxes — set up your IRS.gov account now rather than mailing checks that sit in an understaffed processing center for weeks.
"All payments must now be made electronically. If you haven't already, set up an IRS.gov account and make sure to make your estimated tax payments through there. A check sitting in a mail pile at a service center nobody is opening doesn't count as a payment until it's processed — and that can take months right now."
Romeo Razi spent years inside the IRS as an auditor. He knows how the agency thinks, where they make mistakes, and how to get you the best possible outcome.
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