Terry Gerton You have written an article about the IRS, and it starts with your own effort to resolve what should have been a relatively routine IRS issue, but as you reported it out, you found similar experiences from tax practitioners and advocates and IRS officials. What really persuaded you that your experience was just the symptom of something much bigger?

Stephanie Mencimer Well, I had actually written a story about the IRS a year ago. I’m from Ogden, Utah, and the IRS has a giant service center in Ogden. And so, you know, everyone in Ogdon at some point seems to have worked there at some points, so I was out there during the big cuts, the big staffing cuts. So I was aware that they had cut very fast and had cut all sorts of people, everybody from the mail room on up and. You know, I think they had, by the time I ran into my troubles with them, they had cut 30% of the workforce basically. And I think when I started having problems, I thought, Oh, this is what everyone warned me about last year, that the IRS couldn’t function like this and they can’t lose a third of their staff and think they’re going to be able to still process all the work that they do.

Terry Gerton The IRS customer service and effectiveness has been the butt of jokes for decades, I think. What evidence did you find that conditions today are really different from what have been historical challenges for them?

Stephanie Mencimer Well, the IRS’s own data shows that they are having trouble answering the phone. They aren’t answering the mail. They have backlogs that are recent. You know, I think during COVID, a lot of the mail piled up at the IRS. And so they did have a lot of unanswered mail unprocessed, like amended returns. But the Biden administration put money into the Inflation Reduction Act to try to shore up the IRS And they had hired a lot of people in 2024, 2023, to try to help get a handle on these things and improve customer service. And so things were getting better. They were trending — all the data was saying they were answering more calls. The backlogs were going down. And then Trump came into office in January 2025, and all of that just ground to a halt and reversed itself. And the data that I looked at from various places, the Treasury Inspector General, the IRS’s, the Taxpayer Advocate Service, all the data showed that everything was getting worse, that some tiny percentage of the calls that they get were actually being answered. And the mail backlog had gone from like 3 million pieces of mail to 7 million in just one year. So my experience just was supported by all that data.

Terry Gerton Much of your reporting focuses on workforce reductions and yet we’ve had senior officials say this was the best tax filing season ever. When you consider the experiences that you’ve documented with those kinds of public statements, how do you reconcile the difference?

Stephanie Mencimer Well, I think that the IRS actually deployed a lot of people to answer the phone and to take some of those functions during tax season, like just in the run up to April 15th. And they took people from all over the place. Ultimately, they wiped out 40% of the IT department at the IRS. But the people who are left, they redeployed those people to answer the phones during tax filing seasons. So I think they made a big push to try to get people during that window of when everybody’s filing their taxes to make things work a little better. But as a lot of the tax practitioners told me, the real test of how the IRS is functioning comes on April 16th, the day after. And that’s what happened to me. I got a letter about a month or two after my taxes had been filed saying, you know, there’s been an error. We’ve corrected your return and so that’s what happens when all these people start getting these notices and now that’s where the staffing cuts are really showing up I think is that there’s just nobody there to address these more complicated problems or to deal with some stuff that’s I think it’s kind of automated you know. There’s a fair amount of automated stuff that comes out of the IRS. And so that seems to chug along. But like if you’re a taxpayer and you get one of these letters, you need to respond to them. You need to call and say, wait, this is wrong or, oh, I need a payment plan or whatever. And those calls just are not getting answered. I’ve spent hours and hours and hours on the phone with the IRS and half the time I’ve been disconnected, you know, and that’s sometimes after sitting on hold for two hours, or sometimes they don’t even let you stay on hold because the phone lines are overwhelmed. And I talked to a number of lawyers who work in low-income tax clinics and they help people try to resolve their issues with the IRS. They can’t get through. There’s a special line for, you know, lines for tax practitioners that’s supposed to help them be able to reach somebody. They can’t reach anybody. When they do reach someone they say that they these people don’t know anything and then they ask for a manager but there’s managers, they never get manager callbacks. So, you know, everybody I talked to had horror stories about trying to reach the IRS. And a lot of these people, like one guy I talked to had been doing tax law and pro bono representation of low-income taxpayers for like 50 years. He said, ‘I’ve never seen it this bad.’

Terry Gerton Stephanie Mencimer is a senior reporter with Mother Jones. Stephanie, let’s follow up on that last comment that you made because a lot of times when we think about customer experience with the IRS, we think about the taxpayer and certainly that’s important. But there are taxpayer advocates, there are law enforcement agencies, there are attorneys for all kinds of organizations that wanna reach folks at the IRS. And the senior leaders there have said, automation is gonna help us, AI is gonna to help us. But you’re addressing a really fundamental human to human connection here. What are we thinking about in terms of customer experience? Who gets that? Who’s responsible for it? What do you see as the future there?

Stephanie Mencimer Well, I think the IRS has even realized that they have cut to the bone and they have been trying to hire people back. But, you know, because of the way they did it, the way that they just slash through the workforce, nobody wants to go back there because the one huge benefit of working for the government is the stability, historically, you might not get paid as much … as you would in the private-sector, but it’s usually stable and the Trump administration just upended all of that. And so they won’t hire back the people they fired. So I think that’s part of the issue. And, you know, they have closed the window to a lot of in-person types of opportunities. Like, during the Biden administration, they used that extra money from Congress to open in-person taxpayer assistance centers, which existed before, but a lot of them had been shut down or they weren’t fully staffed. Biden, I think, managed to get it to the point there were like more than 100 of these that were staffed, fully staffed. So people who aren’t good with technology, or maybe their first language isn’t English or they’re just an elderly person and they can’t make the scanner work, whatever. Like, you can go in person and get help with your tax issues. And since Trump took office, the number of those places has fallen from like a hundred, more than a hundred to about 40. And so, as I discovered, I thought maybe I’d go to one maybe because I couldn’t get anyone on the phone. I thought I’ll go to this place and they could help me and I’ll just take all my paperwork. But you actually need an appointment usually to go there and the only way to make an appointment with one of these places is to call the IRS and I could never get through on the phones. And so I think that you know, there’s a whole segment of the population that, people — as I mentioned in my story, a lot of people, low-income people are very vulnerable to fraud by dodgy tax preparers, you know, people who promise them, oh, we can get you these big refunds. And it turns out they’re not really eligible for them. And so they often find out very late in the game that they owe the government a bunch of money. And so they need to be able to get a payment plan or to address these issues, and they just can’t. You know, the risks of not responding to the IRS are quite high. You know, ultimately they can take your house, they can just take your bank account. They have a lot of power to come and take the money they think that you owe. And if you can’t get through, you know, you’re going to be in big trouble and these things can have repercussions for years to come.

Terry Gerton Stephanie, let’s take politics out of this conversation. We haven’t really touched on it now, but I don’t want a political answer to this next question either. The IRS fundamentally exists to generate the money to operate the government, right? That’s what it’s about. It’s about money in and money out. And most Americans actually want to pay their taxes, right? Nobody wants to be a tax dodge. So when you think about how the IRS and the Trump administration are approaching just the basic responsibilities here, got to collect money in, got to put money out. What do you think is the management philosophy at work behind all of these changes?

Stephanie Mencimer That’s a really good question, because I don’t know that there is one. It’s really short-sighted. I think that people misunderstand how the IRS functions and what it does, and how competent a lot of the civil service really is. It’s a huge and unwieldy system with 330 million people covered through the IRS. And I think there are these ideas that there’s an easy technological fix for a lot of what the IRS does. And that’s just not true. You know, they were doing some fixes, actually, you know, a couple years ago, and trying to fix them, make some of these things work better. And, you, know, when you fire 40% of the IT department, that just can’t happen. So I don’t know what the management strategy is there. It doesn’t seem to really come from anything. It’s like nihilism, like this just idea that government is bad. And, you know, there are people who philosophically think that taxation is theft, and, you know, I think there are wealthy people who really hate the IRS and don’t want to have to pay taxes. And they’re the ones who often push to dismantle the parts of the enforcement system that would take a chunk out of their income. And so there are a lot of, you know, the IRS has a lot enemies, even though, it’s so central to democracy. I’d read somewhere a long time ago that I think it was Nelson Mandela when he first became president of a post-apartheid South Africa, one of the first things he did was to create a really functioning revenue service because he realized that you can’t have a functioning democracy if your government can’t work for people. And, you know, to put your agenda across and to work on things like equality and raising the standard of living for your residents. It’s all part of a fair and equitable tax administration, and people forget about that.