A new watchdog review of the Internal Revenue Service’s enforcement activity found that audits of the country’s highest earners fell sharply over the past year, even as the agency lost more than a quarter of the staff who conduct them. Examinations opened for taxpayers reporting more than $400,000 in income dropped by roughly 27 percent between fiscal 2024 and fiscal 2025, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. The decline says less about any single high earner’s odds of being audited and more about a broader question of who ends up filling gaps in federal revenue, a question that eventually touches the programs older Americans rely on, from Social Security’s trust funds to Medicare financing.
A Workforce Cut Nearly to the Bone
The audit decline traces directly to staffing. TIGTA’s report, Trends in Compliance Activities Through Fiscal Year 2025, found that the IRS’s examination and collection workforce grew from 20,098 employees at the end of fiscal 2023 to 27,217 by the end of fiscal 2024, as the agency used Inflation Reduction Act funding to hire auditors and revenue officers. That growth reversed just as quickly: staffing fell to 19,612 by the end of fiscal 2025, then to 17,517 as of January 10, 2026, a loss of nearly 10,000 positions from the fiscal 2024 peak in a little more than a year. The hiring wave itself had reversed a much longer decline, since the exam and collection corps had shrunk for more than a decade before the 2022 law temporarily reversed course, and the newest cuts erased most of that gain in a single year. TIGTA cautioned that the downstream effects of the reductions “are likely to become more apparent over time,” a warning that applies to enforcement revenue as much as to audit counts.
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Wealthy Taxpayers See Fewer Examinations, Not Zero
The falloff was not limited to any one income tier, but it landed hardest on the segment IRS leadership had prioritized only a year earlier. Examination starts for individual taxpayers fell about 30 percent from fiscal 2024 to fiscal 2025 overall, and audits of people earning more than $400,000 fell by roughly 27 percent over the same period. The IRS’s Global High Wealth program, created to examine complex returns from the wealthiest filers, had 27 percent fewer employees as of January 2026 than it did before the fiscal 2025 workforce reductions began. Not every audit category shrank at the same rate: the agency reported a 17 percent increase in large corporate audit starts even as it opened about 30 percent fewer audits of new business partnerships, a slowdown TIGTA linked to a separate internal reorganization that shifted staff and delayed training for revenue agents. None of this means high earners stopped being audited; it means fewer of those examinations opened, and cases already underway can still take years to close, so some of the apparent decline could still reverse as pending audits work their way through the system. The IRS had specifically directed additional examination resources toward higher-income taxpayers in fiscal 2024, before the workforce reductions that began in 2025 cut across nearly every income group and audit category the agency covers, from wage earners to large partnerships.
Record Tax Receipts, Weaker Enforcement Revenue
None of the staffing losses show up in the government’s overall tax haul. Taxpayers paid the IRS $5.3 trillion in total tax revenue in fiscal 2025, a 13.2 percent increase from fiscal 2023 and the most ever collected in nominal terms, driven largely by growth in individual income tax withholding and payments. Enforcement revenue tells a more complicated story. It reached a historic $98.7 billion in fiscal 2024, then slipped to $93.8 billion in fiscal 2025, a decline TIGTA attributed mainly to a 35 percent drop in examination-related revenue. Collection revenue, by contrast, kept climbing as the IRS resumed automated collection notices that had been paused on and off since the pandemic, meaning the enforcement dollars that did come in leaned more on chasing already-identified debts than on opening new audits. The gap between record receipts and falling audit revenue is not a contradiction: withholding and estimated payments make up the overwhelming majority of what the Treasury collects every year, and enforcement revenue has always been a comparatively small slice of the total. It is, however, the slice most directly tied to whether the tax code is enforced evenly across income levels, which is why watchdogs track it separately from overall receipts. The increase in collection revenue between fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2025 came largely from the restart of routine notices to taxpayers who already owed money and had fallen behind, a category of enforcement that requires far fewer specialized examiners than opening a new audit of a complex return.
The IRS Points to Technology, Not Headcount
IRS leadership has argued that fewer auditors does not have to mean weaker enforcement. In April testimony to the Senate Finance Committee, IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank Bisignano told lawmakers that “advanced data and analytic strategies allow us to catch instances of tax evasion that would have been undetectable just a few years ago,” and that the agency is using artificial intelligence and analytics to flag high-risk returns with greater precision. Whether that substitution closes the gap left by nearly 10,000 departed examination and collection employees is the open question TIGTA’s report leaves for its next annual review. It is the same trade-off that will determine whether historic tax receipts and thinner audit coverage of the highest earners can coexist over the long run without widening the gap between what is legally owed and what actually gets collected.
Where the Help Actually Is
Separately, federal audit staffing has nothing to do with whether an older household is collecting the state and local benefits it already qualifies for. Programs such as senior property-tax relief, state unclaimed property, and SNAP food benefits for people over 60 exist in nearly every state, but almost none of them enroll a person automatically. Each one requires its own application, which means the money simply goes unclaimed when nobody knows to ask.
The Benefits Checklist is a 69-page guide covering eleven of these programs in plain language, including how each one is applied for and who typically qualifies.
Compare the eligibility rules for these programs side by side in The Benefits Checklist.
This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI tools, using enforcement data published by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, and was reviewed for accuracy before publication.
Warren Cohen is a finance writer based in Phoenix, Arizona, covering personal finance topics including credit, banking, and beginner investing. He earned his degree in business administration from Arizona State University and began his career working in consumer finance, where he gained direct experience with lending and credit systems. He now writes for personal finance websites and fintech platforms, focusing on clear, practical content that helps readers make informed financial decisions.
