Months after Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency stripped the Internal Revenue Service of parts and seized as much taxpayer data as they could get their hands on, the agency is getting some support — just not from real people. According to a report by Axios, the IRS is deploying AI agents across several divisions of the agency for the first time. So get ready to have your tax season questions answered by a bot.
According to the report, the IRS has used Salesforce to provide AI support through its AgentForce platform. AI agents will come forward to provide assistance in the Office of the Chief Counsel, Taxpayer Advocate Services and Appeal Office.
The Taxpayer Advocate Services Division is an independent organization within the IRS whose purpose is to help taxpayers solve problems and recommend changes to the agency that will prevent problems. The Appeals Office, also described as an independent organization, aims to help resolve tax-related disputes without litigation. Both seem to be areas where you’ll want to talk to a person, so hopefully the agents aren’t being deployed in a customer-facing capacity.
According to Axios, the agents provided by Salesforce are meant to “augment and complement the work of these departments”, and will be used for tasks such as providing case summaries and searching for documents. Paul Tatum, executive vice president of global public sector solutions at Salesforce, told the publication that the company “does not advocate a blind AI processing tax returns without involving a human in the review and supplementation,” but added that it is ultimately up to the agency how it decides to staff itself with AI agents.
The IRS could definitely use some support. It had already lost more than a quarter of its workforce due to cutbacks led by DOGE earlier this year and was the target of furloughs during the government shutdown, which led to nearly half of its workforce being laid off. According to a report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the IRS has reduced its tax auditors by one-third from its 2024 level, meaning it has also reduced an important source of revenue. According to an analysis by Better IRS, every $1 spent on audits of the top 0.1% of earners could return up to $26 in tax revenues. Last year, the IRS estimated that it was able to collect an additional $561 billion in unpaid and overdue taxes over the next decade with full funding.
Instead, it seems the Trump administration will opt to let that money sit there and instead try to extract cash by replacing workers with AI and closing free file programs so people have to pay to file their taxes. We’ll see if the math works out.