After the IRS unveils its plans to spend billions in new funding, wealthy and international taxpayers can expect new attention from the agency in coming years.

The Internal Revenue Service has released its strategic operating plan for the next decade, the agency’s blueprint for how it plans to spend $80 billion in funding that was green lighted by last year’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.

More than $45 billion of the funding is slated for enforcement. The IRS will also be hiring tens of thousands of new employees, partially to make up for ongoing attrition and years of declining funding and staffing. The remainder of the funding will go toward IRS taxpayer services, operations support and business systems modernization.

The plan provides “a vision for the future” of U.S. tax administration, IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel wrote in the introduction to the 150-page document, including “new capacities, including specialized skills, in place to unpack the complex filings of high-income taxpayers and large corporations and partnerships.”

This will address “a growing chasm between the number of experienced compliance personnel at the IRS who audit high-income, high-wealth tax filings for compliance (about 2,600 employees) and the roughly 30,000 individuals making more than $10 million a year, 60,000 large corporations and 300,000 large partnerships and S corps,” the agency said.
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