The IRS, formally known as the Internal Revenue Service, is the government organization that handles all taxation matters in the United States of America. Before going into the numbers themselves, it is important to point out that the IRS employs more than just full-time workers. The IRS also has part-time workers, seasonal workers, and even intermittent workers, as well. Intermittent employment at the IRS means that you do not have a regular schedule, which is only really suitable when the work itself is unpredictable and sporadic. In any case, the IRS does offer other types of employment aside from merely standard full-time employment.
The first part of answering the question of how many people work for the IRS is discussing their full-time workers. According to the IRS's own data, they employed 75,773 full-time workers during the 2020 fiscal year. It is important to note that the IRS tracks these statistics based on the fiscal year, as you might expect given their duties. That number might sound fairly high to you, but it actually represents a significant decrease in the number of full-time equivalent positions used at the IRS. The number of full-time equivalent positions used at the IRS has decreased by nearly 20 percent since the fiscal year of 2010.
However, it is more difficult to say how many part-time or seasonal employees work at the IRS. Those numbers are not quite as easily accessible as the statistics regarding the IRS's full-time equivalent positions. The IRS does keep track of these statistics, though. According to their data, they had a total of 76,956 permanent employees at the end of the 2020 fiscal year. There were 3,273 workers that were not permanent workers at the end of the fiscal year 2020 and they were classified under the 'Other' category in the IRS's data.
More Details About the IRS's Personnel
The IRS actually provides even more data about their personnel in this same table. In terms of seasonal employees, the IRS had 10,984 seasonal employees at the end of the fiscal year 2020, according to their records. Seasonal employees were the second-largest personnel type behind only customer service representatives at the end of the fiscal year 2020. This is an interesting part of the answer to how many people work for the IRS.
Revenue agents were the third-largest personnel type at the end of the fiscal year 2020 and this is understandable for the IRS. Attorneys were actually one of the smaller personnel types based on the number of personnel in that type at the end of the fiscal year 2020. Only 1,462 IRS employees were grouped under the 'Attorneys' personnel type on the IRS's table.