WASHINGTON—The Internal Revenue Service plans to hire 5,000 employees over the next few months and 5,000 more by the end of September 2023, aiming to eliminate a long backlog of unprocessed tax returns and correspondence that has left millions of frustrated taxpayers in its wake.
The agency’s goal is to take a paperwork pile that sits at around 20 million items and reduce it to about one million by the end of the year, senior Treasury Department officials said on Thursday.
The hiring binge will start with job fairs in Kansas City, Mo., Austin, Texas and Ogden, Utah, between now and April 1, concentrating new workers at IRS facilities in those cities that process incoming paperwork and in jobs that require minimal training.
Using exceptions to normal federal hiring rules, the IRS expects to be able to get people working, on site, within 45 days instead of four to six…
