The chief information officer at the IRS will leave his position at the end of the month. Rajiv Uppal’s departure follows several high-profile defections from the tax agency since the beginning of the year.
Uppal was named CIO at the end of December 2023 as part of restructuring at the IRS under former commissioner Danny Werfel. Before joining the IRS, Uppal served as the Director of the Office of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and brought over 25 years of information technology expertise to the IRS from both the public and private sectors. His portfolio included working with venture capital firms, government entities, and Fortune 500 companies. He holds a master’s degree in Systems Science from Louisiana State University and a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology.
Uppal’s position was created as part of Werfel’s plans for a new leadership structure at the agency. As envisioned by Werfel, the organizational structure featured a single Deputy IRS Commissioner instead of two and four new IRS chief positions to oversee taxpayer service, tax compliance, information technology, and operations.
The new organizational structure also included Doug O’Donnell as Deputy IRS Commissioner and Melanie Krause as Chief Operating Officer. Since Werfel’s departure, O’Donnell has left the agency. Melanie Krause is slated to leave on April 28, 2025, the same day as Uppal. Krause stepped in as acting commissioner in early March following the retirement announcement of Doug O’Donnell. O’Donnell had served in the role for just a few short weeks following former IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel’s departure on January 20, 2025 (one week before the tax season officially kicked off). O’Donnell’s departure on February 28 marked a remarkable 39-day span of rotating commissioners. Krause becomes the third commissioner or acting commissioner to leave the agency in less than 80 days.
Uppal’s domain included the current IRS information technology division, a key area of focus for the agency. “Our work in the technology arena is critical to our current work on everything from filing season to our phone lines and our online tools,” Werfel said at the time. “And we must continue to make foundational improvements in this area to ensure the success of our transformation work and bringing new tools to help taxpayers. Creating this position will be critical to making sure information technology works closely with our business units and our transformation teams to create successes for taxpayers and the tax system, now and in the future.”
IRS IT Brain Drain
The IT department at the agency has faced a series of recent challenges, including reduced funding. Republicans in Congress have clawed back roughly half—$40 billion out of the $80 billion—of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funds. The extra money was intended to help the IRS hire 87,000 new workers, including customer service and IT workers, over the next decade. Werfel had previously estimated that, factoring in attrition, the IRS was approaching 90,000 full-time employees—the same as roughly a decade ago and far below staffing numbers in the 1990s.
During the 2025 tax season, around 50 IT executives were placed on administrative leave as part of efforts to reduce the agency’s workforce. Thousands more agency employees are expected to receive pink slips in mid-May, about a month after Tax Day, April 15, and it’s unclear how many of them will be tech-focused.
IRS Data Controversies
IRS technology has been at the center of controversy at the agency since the beginning of the year. In February, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) raised eyebrows when it requested access to sensitive taxpayer data at the IRS. According to various reports, DOGE sought access to the Integrated Data Retrieval System (IDRS). You can think of the IDRS as a master file, which includes tax returns and other taxpayer information, including bank records.
Taxpayers and tax professionals alike have expressed concerns about the safety of IRS data, especially since DOGE would not offer a reason why it needed to access the data. Unfettered access to that data isn’t typically granted to anyone—even the IRS Commissioner. In a recent op-ed for Bloomberg Tax, Werfel wrote that if he, as the former IRS commissioner, had requested access to all the data in the IRS systems, “the agency’s data security team would rightfully say “no.” I would have no compelling need, and there was no legal basis for me to demand it.”
The request for access is even more concerning following an NPR report that staff members at the National Labor Relations Board were alarmed about a spike in data leaving the agency following DOGE access to agency systems—data that might have included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases, and corporate secrets. According to NPR, “members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.”
IRS Website Errors On Tax Day
Closer to Tax Day, taxpayers and tax professionals reported mistakes on the IRS website. One such problem? The extension payment date for taxpayers logged into the IRS website was incorrect. While payment should be made by April 15, 2025, taxpayers who logged in to pay see an April 22, 2025, due date. The site says, “Your payment is due on April 22, 2025, regradless of filing for an extension.” (Yes, the ‘regradless’ typo was on the IRS site, too).
Errors appeared in other spots on the website, too, including misidentifying the amended tax form as Form 104X (it’s Form 1040X) that was recently “filled” instead of “filed.”
Both errors have since been fixed, but other errors remain on the site, including processing updates and problems with the installment agreement option. Additionally, the tab for searching for charities has been removed altogether from the home page—if you’re looking to confirm charitable status, you’ll have to perform a search to find the page first.
Just before the reports, Elon Musk tweeted on X (formerly Twitter) that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had made a fix to the IRS website. It’s not clear whether the changes and the errors are related or whether DOGE had access to other parts of the IRS website. A request made to the IRS asking for more information, including information about the scope of changes made by DOGE, was not answered.
Elimination Of Direct File
More recently, the Trump administration plans to eliminate the IRS Direct File program. While Republican lawmakers had previously targeted the program, the free tax software program had been marked as safe for the 2025 season, with now Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent committing to the program during his confirmation hearing. “I will commit that for this tax season … Direct File will be operative,” Bessent said. However, less than 48 hours after the end of the regular tax filing season, AP News reported that the program will be axed.
Earlier in the filing season, Musk posted on X (formerly Twitter) that he had “deleted” 18F, the group responsible for creating the technology behind the program. The tweet was in response to a post suggesting that “the far left government wide computer office” was recently taken over by Musk allies. That caused some users on social media to incorrectly report that the program itself had been axed in February (it remained open).
18F was not a group inside the IRS but a team of designers, software engineers, strategists, and product managers within the General Services Administration (GSA). The team collaborated with other agencies to fix technical problems, build products, and improve public services through technology. On March 1, 2025, the group was officially shut down.
What Comes Next
The changes—including the data sharing—have directly contributed to a flurry of high-level departures. In addition to Uppal, former commissioners or acting commissioners Werfel, Krause, and O’Donnell have all left or made plans to leave the agency since January. And weeks after O’Donnell departed, acting IRS chief counsel William Paul was removed. Paul was reportedly demoted because he refused to cooperate with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, as DOGE representatives allegedly sought to share taxpayer information with other federal agencies.
The agency is reportedly taking advantage of the departures to review a number of recent technology initiatives. Details, to date, have been sparse.