Last summer, the IRS mailed 427,000 delinquency notification letters to federal employees and retirees who hadn't paid their taxes. Within a month, 59,000 made a payment. Just 4,700 paid what they actually owed.
Total recovered: $58 million. Out of $6.3 billion.
A new report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration — TIGTA — found that more than 571,000 current and retired federal employees owe $6.3 billion in unpaid federal taxes. That's a 43% increase in the number of delinquent federal workers since 2021. In 2024 alone, 215,000 federal workers were delinquent, representing 6.9% of the total federal workforce.
These aren't low-level clerks struggling to make ends meet. According to the TIGTA findings, 14,000 repeat non-filers earn more than $100,000 annually. Roughly 50,000 federal employees and retirees failed to file tax returns at all — not late, not underpaid, just didn't file. And 122 federal workers managed to avoid filing for eight or more years while continuing to collect a government paycheck.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman James Comer, the Kentucky Republican, sent a letter to IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank J. Bisignano demanding the agency hand over detailed data by July 9. Comer's assessment was blunt: "With TIGTA's report showing continuous increases in tax noncompliance among current and former federal employees, the Committee is concerned that this trend will continue unless IRS, the Executive Branch and Congress act now to proactively curb noncompliance with federal tax laws."
The numbers back him up. The IRS has the authority under the Federal Payment Levy Program to garnish up to 15% of a delinquent federal employee's wages or pension through the Bureau of Fiscal Service. It's on the books. The mechanism exists. The question Comer is asking is why it isn't being used at scale.
Comer also pointed to the weak results from those 427,000 letters: "This data demonstrates that the majority of noncompliant federal employees ignored the IRS letters and failed to resolve their tax liabilities in a timely manner or at all." He added that expecting voluntary compliance from career non-filers was unrealistic: "It seems unlikely that employees who are already failing to pay or to file taxes for years in violation of federal laws would voluntarily identify themselves to their employing agencies."
The Treasury Department itself has a delinquency rate of just 2.4% — the agency that houses the IRS. Meanwhile, the broader federal workforce is nearly three times worse. The U.S. Postal Service, with one of the largest federal workforces, contributes significantly to the total.
Some of this traces back to the pandemic. The IRS suspended certain collection programs during COVID-19, and the delinquent balance owed by federal employees and retirees jumped by more than $1.5 billion — a 32% increase — between fiscal year 2021 and fiscal year 2024. The pause was temporary. The debt, apparently, was not.
The agency that audits your $600 Venmo transaction can't collect from the people on its own payroll. The enforcement tools exist. The legal authority exists. The garnishment mechanism exists. What doesn't exist, according to three years of TIGTA data, is the will to use any of it.
That $6.3 billion isn't a rounding error. It's a budget line item that nobody authorized and nobody's collecting.