The IRS spent years chasing ordinary Americans for unpaid taxes while ignoring something far closer to home.
Now a Treasury inspector general report has handed James Comer everything he needs to force a reckoning.
What the inspector general found sitting inside the federal workforce is something the IRS never wanted Congress to see.
571,000 Federal Employees Owe $6.3 Billion in Unpaid Taxes – and the IRS Sent Them a Letter
More than 571,000 current and retired federal employees owe $6.3 billion in unpaid taxes – and that number has exploded 43% since 2021.
A new Treasury Inspector General audit found 215,000 active government workers – nearly 7% of the entire civilian federal workforce – are behind on their federal taxes right now.
The number of current and retired federal tax cheats is bigger than the population of Atlanta.
These aren't people struggling to make ends meet on minimum wage.
The audit found nearly 14,000 of the non-filers earn more than $100,000 a year in taxpayer-funded salaries.
At least 122 federal employees collected a government paycheck for eight or more consecutive years without filing a single tax return.
The IRS's response to this mounting crisis was to send a strongly worded letter.
Of the 427,000 delinquency notices mailed last summer, only 59,000 recipients made any payment at all.
Just 4,700 paid their full balance.
The agency tasked with squeezing every dollar out of ordinary Americans recovered $58 million – less than 1% of the $6.3 billion owed.
Biden pumped $80 billion into the IRS through the Inflation Reduction Act – a war chest his own Treasury Department said would fund 87,000 new IRS employees to chase down tax cheats.
Apparently none of them were looking inside the building.
"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," House Oversight Chairman James Comer wrote to IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank Bisignano.
Comer Demands IRS Wage Garnishment for Federal Employee Tax Delinquency
The Federal Payment Levy Program has given the IRS authority to seize up to 15% of federal paychecks and retiree pensions for unpaid taxes for more than two decades.
The program has largely sat unused for this population while the delinquency total climbed to $6.3 billion.
Comer demanded Bisignano turn over the numbers: how many non-filers were actually referred to the levy program, how many wage garnishment requests were sent to the Bureau of Fiscal Service, and exactly how much taxpayer money was recovered through actual enforcement rather than polite requests.
He wants answers by July 9.
"Your wages get garnished if you're a deadbeat dad," Comer told Just the News. "These are deadbeat taxpayers, and to make it worse, they work for the federal government."
Comer also wants the names made public.
"Their friends and neighbors and relatives and people they attend church with, they need to know that this federal employee is not even bothering to file a tax return," he said.
The Postal Service accounts for roughly a third of all non-filers.
The Department of Veterans Affairs and the Army, Navy, and Homeland Security round out the five agencies responsible for 64% of the total outstanding balance.
The IRS Loophole That Has Protected Federal Tax Cheats for Years
The Internal Revenue Code prohibits the IRS from sharing specific tax delinquency data with any federal agency outside the Treasury Department.
That restriction means the Department of Defense, the VA, the Postal Service, and every other major employer of these delinquent workers cannot be told which of their employees are breaking the law.
The Treasury Department – which faces no such restriction – posted a delinquency rate of just 2.4%, proof of what happens when an agency can actually hold its own workers accountable.
Every other department is flying blind, and the delinquent workers know it.
Comer called the arrangement exactly what it is: "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 Office of Personnel Management recently proposed new rules that would fast-track the firing of federal workers for misconduct – including unresolved tax debt.
Congress has unsuccessfully tried to extend the IRS's mandatory-firing requirement – which currently applies only to IRS employees – to the entire federal workforce.
Biden let it survive. Obama let it survive. Every attempt to close it failed.
A federal workforce that operates in the dark, with no names published and no real enforcement threat, is a workforce that has learned it can ignore the law.
These aren't victims of the tax code's complexity.
They are federal employees, paid by American taxpayers, who chose not to file returns for eight or nine years in a row and calculated – correctly – that nobody would do anything about it.
James Comer just started doing something about it.
Sources:
- Susan Ferrechio, "House Probes IRS Failure to Nab Tax Dodgers in Federal Workforce," The Washington Times, June 25, 2026.
- "Comer Launches Investigation into Billions in Unpaid Taxes Owed by Federal Employees," House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, June 25, 2026.
- Katherine Pugh, "Deadbeat Taxpayers: More than 500,000 Federal Workers, Retirees Are Delinquent Paying Uncle Sam," Just the News, June 27, 2026.
- "House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Investigating Tax Noncompliance Among Feds," Federal News Network, June 29, 2026.
- "Federal Payment Levy Program," Internal Revenue Service, IRS.gov.