IRS audits collected $3.5 billion less in fiscal 2025 as the agency shed thousands of auditors and other agency staffers.
Page B1From§Eachthe matinee edition — 1 September 2026
IRS audit revenue collapses after Trump-ordered staff purge; wealthy tax cheats reap the benefits.
As it ran on the front
IRS Audit Enforcement (Wealthy Filers Division), of Washington, D.C., quietly stopped functioning this year, following a staff purge ordered by the Trump administration. It was, depending on who you asked, either a program or a headache, and lately it has been neither, because a watchdog report confirms the audit revenue it once generated has collapsed.
It is survived by a tax code that remains, on paper, unchanged, and by several thousand wealthy filers who are, as one outlet flatly put it, 'reaping the benefits.' It is preceded in death by a long line of enforcement mechanisms this country has funded and then quietly declined to staff.…
…(cont) Friends of the deceased describe it as thorough to a fault — it did not care whether the return in front of it belonged to a plumber or a hedge fund, which some found admirable and others found, apparently, disqualifying. The purge that ended it was billed as efficiency. The watchdog's numbers suggest it was something closer to malarkey dressed up in a budget memo.
No cause of death was listed on the official filing, which is itself a kind of tell — agencies that die of natural causes usually get an explanation, and this one didn't need one, because nobody in charge of the explanation had to answer to the people who'd have asked for it. That's not a conspiracy, it's just how the paperwork shakes out when the people doing the audits are also the people who got laid off, and that's a shit way to run a revenue agency, said gently, once, and moved past.
There will be no public memorial. The wealthy filers this division used to trouble are not expected to attend. The rest of the country will find out about the absence the old-fashioned way, at tax time, when the letter that used to come doesn't.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you write your representative and ask, plainly, whether the audit staff comes back before the next filing season — and that you not accept 'efficiency' as the whole answer.
“They gutted the people whose whole job was auditing rich folks, and shocker, audits of rich folks dropped. That's not an accident, that's the business model — cut the cops, let the shoplifting quietly become the plan. Guess who picks up the difference at tax time.”
“This was about efficiency, trimming a bloated agency that had been weaponized against ordinary taxpayers — well, the ordinary taxpayers weren't really the ones getting audited, it was mostly high earners, so I suppose weaponized isn't the word I want there.”
The receipts
A report published Monday by an independent federal watchdog shows that Internal Revenue Service audit revenue plummeted last fiscal year as the Trump administration gutted the chronically understaffed and underfunded tax agency's workforce, rolling back recent Democratic efforts to bolster enforcement. The Treasury Inspector General for…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.