Over the past several years, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has experienced a tumultuous period due to rapid policy changes from both Congress and the White House, ongoing struggles to modernize its antiquated technology, and unforeseen challenges like the pandemic. While oversight is provided by agencies like the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS), the IRS lacks a critical internal resource: an official historian. The IRS would benefit by restoring this role to help document its internal processes, preserve institutional memory, capture lessons learned, and improve transparency and accountability—just as other federal entities including the Department of State, the House of Representatives, and the Maritime Administration have found value in dedicated historical offices.
IRS Struggles Highlight the Need for Institutional Memory
One of the largest recent challenges the IRS encountered came during the pandemic with a backlog of taxpayer forms. The IRS accumulated more than 13 million returns to process and 4 million taxpayer letters and correspondence at the end of 2020. These taxpayers forms, files, and documents were submitted through mail to the IRS center, where they had been neglected for over a year because IRS employees were not able to remotely process them. This left taxpayers waiting for their needed refunds, and it increased IRS costs because the IRS has to pay interest on refund payments made 45 days after the filing deadline. Due to the overwhelming backlog of unprocessed paper returns, the IRS ultimately resorted to destroying 30 million information return documents without ever processing them—a move that raised serious concerns about transparency, accountability, and data integrity.
The IRS also faces ongoing challenges in implementing sweeping legislative changes. So far this decade, the agency has been tasked with administering Economic Impact Payments during the pandemic, navigating complex provisions in the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), and responding to new mandates in the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
ARPA, for example, significantly expanded the Child Tax Credit, creating new administrative burdens and accelerating refund processing demands. It also drastically lowered the reporting threshold for Form 1099-K, which has generated confusion for taxpayers and added strain on IRS resources. The IIJA introduced challenges as it increased IRS opportunity and enforcement costs, diverting valuable time and resources away from more productive endeavors. The law’s updated Form 1099-DA introduced an inflated compliance burden for digital assets and cryptocurrency. The IRA provided the IRS with $80 billion in funding, mostly for enforcement, but the IRS has fallen short of achieving the taxpayer service, tax gap, and modernization goals and objectives laid out in the Strategic Operating Plan. Additionally, the IRA created 21 green energy tax expenditures, prompting GAO to warn, “The large amount of money available and the complexity of many of the IRA tax expenditures increase the risk of fraud.”
Another persistent challenge is the IRS’s struggle to modernize its antiquated technology. NTUF organized a Taxpayers for IRS Transformation (Taxpayers FIRST) project that demonstrated the IRS’s lack of progress and achievements in modernization, despite huge funding from the IRA. Because of this, the IRS suffers from resource and structural challenges, outdated technology, antiquated processing systems, and ongoing staffing issues.
This year, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reductions in force and the early retirement option compelled the IRS to redirect the money that was going into former employees’ paychecks and make adjustments so as to stabilize the system in a timely manner. The Taxpayer Advocate report to Congress for Fiscal Year 2025 describes how the IRS workforce was reduced by 25%, which “left the agency with both fewer frontline employees and managers and fewer experienced leaders to carry out its mission.” Likewise, the current Administration’s budget proposal presents a challenge as it entails an overall reduction of 37% that “is likely to impact taxpayers and potentially the revenue collected.”
Restoring the Historian Role to Preserve and Improve the IRS
Given all of the IRS’s recent challenges, there is a clear need to document institutional lessons internally. A proposal to address this issue came in 2011 when the Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson recommended that Congress create a permanent historian position within the IRS to help the Service learn from its past and operate with greater transparency:
From time to time, the IRS undertakes initiatives to improve tax administration, with both successes and failures. Generally, federal laws require retention of and access to IRS and other government records, but no law requires IRS publication of history and no unit of the IRS is charged with recording these events. Thoughtful study of history can help accomplish a mission because understanding agency origins and development aids in comprehending the present situation and illuminates possible future directions. Knowledge of history can prevent the IRS from repeating past efforts that proved fruitless. The National Taxpayer Advocate recommends that Congress create a permanent position within the IRS for a historian with expertise in federal taxation as well as archival methods. Congress should mandate that the IRS historian record history objectively, accurately, and without deletion.
This proposal is still included among TAS’s annual list of recommendations to Congress. The most recent report notes:
Unlike many other federal agencies, the IRS does not have a historian to catalog and publish an analysis of its successes and failures. This is significant because many of the challenges the IRS faces are recurring, such as its decades-long efforts to modernize its information technology systems and its efforts to strike the appropriate balance between collecting delinquent taxes and respecting taxpayer rights. To cite an adage, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
The current Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins recommends that the historian be appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury in consultation with the Archivist of the United States, report to the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, and have expertise in federal taxation and archival methods. The IRS historian must have access to IRS records, including tax returns, and return information so he or she can objectively and accurately assess and record IRS history, without omitting or concealing defects in policy.
The IRS historian would function like other federal historians. The Society for History in the Federal Government explains that federal historians complete policy research, examine written history, give advice to records management, offer research support to other scholars, and are a source of information for their agency, the government, and the public. In addition, “a historical office can provide context for an agency’s mission, permitting its staff to understand their own objectives in light of the agency’s traditions and place in American history.”
Joseph P. “Pat” Harahan was a notable federal historian for the Department of Defense (DoD) On-Site Inspection Agency and Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). Awarded the 2022 Franklin Delano Roosevelt Award, his DTRA histories and writings about the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) and Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaties are “essential for historians working on the topics of nuclear arms control, non-proliferation, threat reduction, and nuclear policy. They are also indispensable to any policymaker seeking to replicate the successes—and avoid the pitfalls—of the inspection regimes associated with these landmark Cold War agreements.”
The IRS’s brief experiment with a historian underscores the need to establish the position as a permanent, statutory role. In 1988, the IRS hired its first and last historian, Shelley Davis. In her book, Unbridled Power: Inside the Secret Culture of the IRS, detailing her experience at the agency, Davis noted that she quickly discovered the IRS’s lack of documented history after Prohibition. In a statement made before the Senate Finance Committee in 1997, Davis emphasized the IRS’s “reluctance to think about the past,” which translated into its habit to shred and destroy any documents that were thought irrelevant. Davis attempted an unsuccessful investigation of the destruction of important IRS history, and she resigned in protest after the IRS charged her with wrongfully leaking sensitive information. Although an IRS historian for only a short period of time, Davis was instrumental in revealing the IRS’s serious need for such a position.
Conclusion
In light of all of its recent challenges, the IRS needs a system to document past failures and successes, make sense of the present, and guide improvements for the future. An IRS historian could play a vital role in holding the agency accountable and help it learn and evolve. Americans deserve a clearer understanding of what’s happening inside the agency—and a tax system that’s informed by its own history and better prepared to serve taxpayers going forward.