How ready is the IRS for tax season?

With tax season in full swing, you might be ready to file — but is the IRS ready? The government agency lost more than a quarter of its staff last year, one of many hit by so-called government efficiency cuts.

For more on where the IRS stands, “Marketplace Morning Report” host Sabri Ben-Achour spoke with Vanessa Williamson, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Sabri Ben-Achour: Not only are more than a quarter of the IRS staff gone, but also a lot of things in the tax code are changing. So is the IRS ready for all that?

Vanessa Williamson: I think there are a lot of reasons for concern. It also lost three-quarters of its senior leadership, and the government shutdown was the longest shutdown in our history. All of these things are real problems on their own, plus a complicated new tax law.

Ben-Achour: Also a question of training: The IRS was slow to process new hires for the season, I understand. Why is that, and does that mean that the current set of employees might be undertrained?

Williamson: It definitely means the current set of employees are undertrained. The IRS lost a lot of really key positions, internal positions that help manage things like hiring. The agency ended up hugely short staffed and only managed to hire 2% of the positions it was supposed to hire for a few key positions, and now they are shifting people from all over the agency to frontline phone service to try and fill in the gaps. But it's it's problematic, to say the least.

Ben-Achour: For all of us filing taxes, what's it going to look like?

Williamson: iI you have a pretty simple tax situation, if you file virtually, and if you don't make a mistake, you're probably OK. But there are a couple of groups of people who should expect problems. First of all, if you're going to try and figure out how to get one of these shiny new objects in the tax code — things like no tax on tips, or the overtime provision, or the car loan provision — those are complicated. There isn't wonderful guidance about it. There's real legalese guidance. And so figuring out all that extra paperwork, if you want to try and call the IRS for help, you'll probably be on hold for quite a while.

Ben-Achour: Will the IRS be as able to catch people who are trying to get out of paying their taxes?

Williamson: We have lost a huge amount of our enforcement staff. And one of the really serious aspects of that is we've lost a lot of the new folks who came in specifically to focus on the highest earners and high-wealth people. And that's where most of the tax gap is. That's where most of the underreporting is. So, yeah, I think we're going to see revenue effects in the long term.

Ben-Achour: Any thoughts on how the IRS could make tax season run more smoothly in the future?

Williamson: We're going to have to do a massive restaffing of this agency. We're going to have to refocus on bringing in highly trained people who can do tax enforcement, not just for regular people, but for people at the top. We'll need to reinvest in our technology. We lost a ton of IT people this year, and this was just a huge setback for an agency that had actually been on an upswing for several years.