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Dave Nershi had completed the reports he had worked on for the months that sinister emails appeared in his inbox.
Nershi worked as a general engineer for the Internal Revenue Agency for nearly nine months. He was one of hundreds of experts who used their technical expertise (Nersi background) to audit Byzantine tax returns submitted by large corporations and wealthy individuals. Until recently, the IRS had a shortage of these experts, and many complicated tax returns were not condemned. With the help of people like Nershi, the IRS was able to recover millions and sometimes more than $1 billion on a single tax return.
However, on February 20th, shy of completing his probation period for three months and becoming a full-time employee, the IRS fired him. As a naval veteran, Nersi loved working in public services and wanted to escape mass shootings. An unsigned email said he was fired for performance despite receiving a high mark from the manager.
The report he had finalized has probably been recovered more than the lower six-figure salary he earned. The report is incomplete.
Nershi agreed that the federal government could be more lean and efficient, but even Elon Musk’s logic of government efficiency initiative was plagued by the decision to fire scores of highly skilled IRS experts like him, who were an asset to the government. “By firing us, you’re going to reduce how much income the country will bring,” Nersi said in an interview. “This wasn’t about saving money.”
Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his top billionaire adviser Musk have launched a full blitz to cut costs and reduce the federal government. Trump, Musk and other administrative leaders not only say the US government is bloated and inefficient, but they also see it as a fortress of political opposition and call it a “deep state.”
The strategy used by the Trump administration to reduce the size of the government is indiscriminate and widespread, intended to expel civil servants as quickly as possible in as many agencies as possible, while moraleing remaining workers at work. As Russell, director of the Trump White House’s Office of Management and Budget and architect of Project 2025, vabled, published in a speech first reported by Propublica, “Bureaucrats want to affect the trauma. When they wake up in the morning, we hope they don’t want to go to work as they are increasingly seen as villains.”
What we see
During Donald Trump’s second presidency, Propovica will focus on areas that need scrutiny. Below are some of the issues reporters watch, and how to safely communicate with them.
We are doing something new. Helpful?
One tactic used by the administration is to target probation workers who are prone to firing due to low protection for civil servants. In this context, the trial version only means that the employee is not used to his role. Propublica has found that the latest IRS shooting has wiped out highly skilled and experienced probation workers who have recently joined the government or have moved from another agency to a new position.
In late February, the Trump administration began firing more than 6,000 IRS employees. The agency was particularly hit hard. Current and former employees were prepared to hire thousands of new enforcement and customer service representatives in 2023, and only began hiring and training those workers on any scale in 2024, with many of these new employees still in the scheduled period. Nershi was hired as part of this wave last spring. This boost comes after Congress had been short on institutions for most of the past decade. This has resulted in chronic staffing shortages, gross customer service and a plunge in audit rates, especially for taxpayers who earn more than $500,000 a year.
It seems the government doesn’t want to stop there. The report drafts a plan to cut the entire workforce in half.
Unlike other federal agencies, IRS cuts mean that the government collects less money and there is less tax abuse. Economic studies show that for every dollar spent by the IRS, institutions will return between $5 and $12, depending on the amount of income declared by taxpayers. A 2024 report by the Non-Participation Government Accountability Office found that the IRS discovered $13,000 in savings per hour auditing tax returns for very wealthy taxpayers.
John Koskinen, who headed the IRS from 2013 to 2017, said in an interview that it doesn’t make sense whether Trump and Musk really care about financial responsibility and eradicate waste, fraud and abuse. “What I’ve never understood is, if you’re interested in the deficit and are restraining it, why cut the revenue side?” Koskinen said.
Neither the IRS nor the White House responded to requests for comment. Last month, Musk asked his followers on X, the platform he owned, “@doge likes to audit the IRS. According to a White House spokesman, Doge employees are trying to access IRS taxpayer data, “trying to shed light on fraud.”
In this story, Propublica interviewed more than 12 current and former IRS employees. Most of those people worked in the agency’s large corporations and international (LB&I) department. Within the IRS, the LB&I sector has the highest return on investment, and widespread cuts there have been severely alleviating the human and financial costs of the Trump administration’s approach to saving money and reducing government functions in the name of fighting waste and fraud.
According to current and former LB&I employees, taxpayers they audited included pharmaceutical companies, oil and gas companies, construction companies, major technology companies, and more obscure private and wealthy individuals. None of the IRS employees who spoke to Propublica disclosed any particular taxpayer information citing the privacy laws.
Employees said LB&I leadership was driving more revenue agents and appraisers as well as professional employees, such as oil engineers, computer scientists and corporate partnership experts. Typically known internally as general engineers, these employees consulted on complex tax returns and helped them determine whether the taxpayer properly charged a certain credit or other tax credit.
This work is a legitimate tool for large companies to seek tax relief, but can also be used inappropriately. A highly skilled appraiser has recovered massive savings when it comes to infamous tax systems, such as known as syndicate conservation agents. This has been frequently abused as it is criticised by both Congressional Democrats and Republicans, and the IRS has included it on its list of “dirty Dozen” tax fraud.
“These are when you don’t have technical expertise in your revenue agent,” said an IRS engineer who is still employed at the agency and, like other IRS employees, is not permitted to speak to the media. “That’s what we do. We’re working on something that requires absolutely no expertise.”
Current and former IRS employees told Propublica that the agency has spent a huge amount of resources in recent years recruiting and training new professionals. Vanessa Rollins, an IRS Chicago office engineer who was recently fired, said LB&I probation employees outweigh full-time staff in her office. Much of her team’s work was focused on training and mentoring for a wave of new employees. Most of them have been fired recently. “The whole office was oriented to bring us in and get trained,” Rollins said.
These experts said they earned a higher salary compared to many other IRS employees. However, the money these experts recovered as a result of their work was orders of magnitude greater than they would cost. The current engineer told Propublica that it estimated that a team of less than 10 people had brought in a $5 billion adjusted tax return over the past four years. (In contrast, an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, published on February 22, found that Doge found $2.6 billion in savings next year.
Former LB&I revenue agents added that their work did not always lead to the IRS getting money back from taxpayers. Sometimes they would just audit returns and find that taxpayers were owing more money than they expected.
“The IRS’ mission is to treat taxpayers fairly and to pay taxes that they legally owe, including not paying more than they are legally required,” the former income agent said.
Despite the return on investment and the sense of obligation that employees support, LB&I has been particularly hit by the recent wave of firing, the employees said. According to current IRS engineers, the Trump administration appears to have eliminated the work of around 120 lb&I engineers, a total of 260. The person said he heard that more endings are expected soon. Deputy IRS Chief and longtime agency leader Doug O’Donnell announced his retirement amid shooting.
Several LB&I employees told ProPublica that the large layoffs were ordered from a very high level and that some managers were coming or that they didn’t know what to expect. According to employees, the cut appeared to focus solely on whether they were on probation, rather than distinguishing between employees with a particular level of professional or performance. “The skill set didn’t matter. If they were under a year, they were cut,” another current LB&I employee told Propublica.
Elon Musk’s demolition crew
Current and former IRS employees said the shootings and the administration’s postponed offer of resignation led to situations that wiped out decades of experience and institutional knowledge that could not be easily replaced. Jack McCunber is a Seattle senior LB&I appraiser and was fired about six weeks before the end of the probationary status. He not only lost his job, but also said that his mentor, the veteran appraiser, retired early. McCunber and his leaders are working on cases of conservative easements in syndicates that can often reclaim dozens, or even hundreds of millions of dollars. “They’re pushing out people who are more experienced, they’re pushing out people like me,” McCunber said. “It’s a double wamy.”
As a result, businesses and wealthy individuals face far less scrutiny when they file their tax returns, resulting in more risk-taking and less flow to the US Treasury Department, according to employees and experts.
“Large businesses and highly affluent individuals are where you have the most sophisticated taxpayers and lawyers who agree to push envelopes as much as possible.” “When those audits stop, there’s no one to do them, so people will say, ‘Hey, I did it last year, I’ll do it again this year too.” ”
“When you hamstring the IRS,” Koskinen added. “It’s just a tax cut for tax cheats.”
