Some IRS employees kept laptops and phones after resigning

Hundreds of Internal Revenue Service employees retained their laptops and smartphones accepting a voluntary buyout offer from the IRS last year, according to a new report.

The report, released Thursday by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, found from April through July 2025, approximately 22,000 employees left the IRS either through voluntary separations, the Deferred Resignation Program or other incentives offered by the IRS as the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency tried to slash the size of the federal workforce at agencies including the IRS. These employees were assigned more than 32,000 information technology assets.

TIGTA analyzed the records of those approximately 22,000 employees who departed the IRS in that time period and found that although most of the assets were returned, 1,308 assets (4%) did not appear to have been returned as of November 2025. TIGTA shared a list of the assets with the IRS's information technology department  and recommended they perform a reconciliation to locate the assets and update the asset management system. As of April 2026, the IRS has still not located 594 assets, including laptops and smartphones, valued at over $270,000.

"While IRS policy requires assets to be returned upon departure, it does not include any specific time frame requirements," said the report. "We found that this contributed to the inaccuracy of the asset inventory. Further, the IRS does not have a policy for recovering the costs of unreturned assets from departing employees. Therefore, there are no consequences if a departing employee fails to return their assets."

In addition, TIGTA noted, the IRS doesn't have a policy to recover the cost of unreturned assets from separated employees.

TIGRA made four recommendations to improve the asset retrieval process, including updating policies to include specific time frames for returning assets, ensuring that necessary steps are taken to locate potentially stolen assets and that the necessary documentation to report the assets is provided to TIGTA's Office of Investigations, adding audit trails to the audit trail repository for monitoring, and updating policies to clarify that system administrators must ensure that audit trails are sent to the repository, with instructions for how to do so. The IRS agreed with TIGTA's recommendations and plans to implement corrective actions.

"The IRS will update applicable policies, strengthen asset retrieval and recovery processes, complete audit trail integration and monitoring for the Hardware Asset Management system, and validate that applicable policy contains audit trail requirements for system administrators, including cloud-based systems, and provides a reference to the process for forwarding audit trails to the centralized repository, " wrote IRS CIO Kaschit Pandya in response to the report.  

However, he added, "While the IRS can establish and communicate policy requirements, its ability to compel compliance is limited when individuals do not comply with those requirements."

The new report follows on the heels of another recent TIGTA report earlier this month that found nearly 14,000 IRS employees who accepted the Deferred Resignation Program offer retained access to one or more sensitive systems as of June 2025 while on administrative leave before they officially separated from the agency. TIGTA also found that some employees who took a deferred resignation offer could have accessed IRS facilities or systems because the IRS did not initially have a policy to collect ordisable the Personal Identity Verification cards of employees on administrative leave.

The IRS imposed a return-to-office policy last year that left many employees without sufficient office space and equipment, while staff cutbacks led to a reduction of over 25% of the IRS workforce. IRS employees continue to face pressures after the cancellation of their collective bargaining agreement, leading to a lawsuit by the National Treasury Employees Union.