The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is short on skilled employees to develop artificial intelligence (AI) tools – and a plan to address that problem – the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report issued on March 24.
At the root of the agency’s problems, GAO said, are staff cuts during 2025 that included at least several dozen full-time or part-time employees working on putting AI capabilities in place at the IRS.
Those AI-related staff losses, the congressional watchdog said, include 63 people in the IRS’s Research, Applied Analytics, and Statistics group. “Other IRS units also reported reductions in staff that support AI efforts, in addition to organizational and contractual changes,” GAO said.
Amid the staffing reductions, GAO found that IRS “doesn’t have a workforce plan to identify and address the skills its AI workforce needs.”
And alongside that, GAO said IRS has an incomplete inventory of AI applications that fails to include all the ways AI is being used or identify how the AI tools would benefit the agency.
Taken together, GAO concluded that the staff reductions, lack of a plan to address the AI skills gap, and intent to pursue further AI initiatives “increase the risk that IRS AI efforts will not succeed.”
Up to now, the IRS has been using AI to “help with its operations, including audit selection and answering taxpayer questions,” GAO said, while warning that the agency “may not be ready” to carry out plans to use AI more in the future.
GAO gave IRS a list of eight recommendations to address the AI skills gaps, workforce planning, and inventory problems, and to “require reporting on use case alignment to strategic goals.”
According to GAO, IRS agreed with the recommendations and is planning steps to address them.