The IRS, ahead of an upcoming reorganization of its tech office, is putting its IT staff to the test.

The agency, in an email sent Monday, directed its IT workforce to complete a “technical skills assessment.”

IRS Chief Information Officer Kaschit Pandya told employees that the assessment is part of a broader effort to gauge the team’s technical proficiency, ahead of an “IRS IT organizational realignment.”

“Over time, hiring practices and role assignments have evolved, and we want to ensure our technical workforce is accurately aligned with the work ahead. The assessment will help establish a baseline understanding of our collective strengths and areas for development,” Pandya told staff in an email sent Monday.

Pandya’s office is leading the technical skills assessment, in coordination with the Treasury Department, the IRS human capital office and the Office of Personnel Management.

“I want to emphasize that this is a baseline assessment, not a performance rating. Your individual-level results will not affect your pay or grade,” he told staff. “I know this comes during a very busy and uncertain time, and I deeply appreciate your partnership.”

Pandya told staff that a “limited group” of IRS IT employees in technical roles — including developers, testers and artificial intelligence/machine learning engineers have been invited to complete the test. He told staff that, as of Monday, about 100 employees were directed to complete the assessment.

On Friday, an IRS IT employee told Federal News Network that several hundred employees have now completed the assessment, and that it took employees about 90 minutes to complete it.

According to the employee, Pandya told staff in an all-hands meeting on Friday that one of the agency’s goals is to rely more on full-time IT employees, and less on outside contractors. He said during that meeting that IRS IT currently has about 6,000 IT employees and about 4,500 contractors.

“It doesn’t make sense, considering all the RIFs, firings and decisions that ignored expertise,” the IRS IT employee said.

The IRS has lost more than 25% of its workforce so far this year, largely through voluntary separation incentives. Pandya told staff in an email this summer that the agency needs to “reset and reassess,” in part because more than 2,000 IT employees have separated from the IRS since January. The IRS had about 8,500 IT employees at the start of fiscal 2025.

The agency also sent mass layoff notices to its employees during the government shutdown, but has rescinded those notices as required by Congress in its spending deal that ended the shutdown.

The Treasury Department sent reduction-in-force notices to 1,377 employees during the recent government shutdown — as part of a broader RIF that targeted about 4,000 federal workers. Court documents show the IRS employees received the vast majority of those RIF notices, and that they disproportionately impacted human resources and IT personnel at the IRS.

The technical assessment is also in line with goals set by Treasury CIO and Department of Government Efficiency representative Sam Corcos, who recently said IRS IT layoffs were “painful,” but necessary for the agency’s upcoming tech reorganization.

In a recent podcast interview, Corcos said much of his time as Treasury CIO has been focused on projects at the IRS, and that the agency’s IT workforce doesn’t have the necessary skills to deliver on its long-term modernization goals.

“We’re in the process of recomposing the engineering org in the IRS, which is we have too many people within the engineering function who are not engineers,” he said. “The goal is, let’s find who our engineers are. Let’s move the people who are not into some other function, and then we’re going to bring in more engineers.”

Corcos estimated that there are about 100 to 200 IRS IT employees currently at the organization that he trusts to carry out his reorganization plans.

“When you go in and you talk to people, a lot of the people, especially an engineer, the engineers on the team, they want to solve this problem. They don’t feel good about the fact that this thing has been ongoing for 35 years and will probably never get done. They actually want to solve these problems.”

IT employees at several agencies have gone through evaluations and assessments during the Trump administration. Tech employees at the General Services Administration were also interviewed and questioned about their skills and expertise by GSA and DOGE leadership. GSA later downsized its Technology Transformation Services office and shuttered its 18F tech shop.

In March, the IRS removed 50 of its IT leaders from their jobs and put them on paid administrative leave. Corcos defended that decision, saying the IRS “has had poor technical leadership for roughly 40 years.”

Corcos said those former IRS IT leaders pushed back on DOGE’s audit of government contracts. The agency, he added, spent an “astounding” amount on cybersecurity contracts, but former leaders resisted cutting and scaling back any of those contracts.

“The initial leadership team just said, ‘Everything is critical, you can’t cut anything. In fact, we need more,’” Corcos said. “And when we swapped them out for people who were more in the weeds, who knew what these things were, we found actually quite a lot that we could cut.”

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