Former IRS commissioners on what they learned from shutdowns of yesteryear

Sure, we’d love to ask folks from the IRS how they handled the longest shutdown in US history, but we have a feeling they’re a bit busy at the moment.

Though the federal government is reopening, it’s going to take quite some time (and effort) to get things fully up and running again—particularly at the IRS, which furloughed almost half of its workers and limited its operations during the shutdown.

Instead of asking the number-crunchers who are up to their ears in backlogged paperwork, we can turn to the next best thing: the people who’ve handled it before.

At AICPA and CIMA’s National Tax Conference on November 16–18 in Washington, DC, a number of former IRS commissioners shared insights from handling IRS operations in shutdowns past. Their main takeaway is no shocker: It ain’t easy.

Essential or expendable? One of the first challenging determinations as a shutdown looms is establishing what core functions are essential, and what can be paused or scaled back. In the latest shutdown, for instance, the majority of tax refunds weren’t paid, live telephone customer service support was limited, and walk-in taxpayer assistance centers were closed, according to the IRS.

When Danny Werfel, who served as IRS commissioner from March 2023 to January 2025, got to the IRS in 2013, he arrived just in time for the government shutdown that lasted from October 1 to October 17 that year.

Determining what stayed open ultimately came down to interpreting “the Antideficiency Act, and the question is whether you can exempt certain activities from the shutdown in order to protect life or property,” Werfel told panel attendees. While it’s “subject to interpretation” in “the context of tax administration,” Werfel suggested thinking about “that transaction layer of filing and collection assessment and payment of what’s owed to the taxpayer or the balance due.”

“That’s that tight concentric circle of making sure that that fundamental fulcrum of tax administration is happening, because if it’s not, that has been deemed, historically, to be a threat to property, in particular government property, and the government’s interest,” he continued.

Sounds easy enough in theory, but even once you’ve determined what can stay open, it’s not like the closed functions have zero impact on operations, Werfel stressed.

“No matter what, you start to feel disruption and issues in carrying out the activities of what’s turned on,” he noted. “Invariably, because these are imperfect plans, someone will be not furloughed and need something from someone who’s furloughed, and that can slow things down.”

Office morale. John Koskinen, who served as IRS commissioner between 2013 and 2017, also knows a thing or two about shutdowns. He was deputy director of management for the Office of Management and Budget amid a three-week partial government shutdown from 1995 to 1996.

Because government shutdowns were a relatively new-ish phenomenon at that time, Koskinen noted his team was “concerned about the impact on employees.”

“If we started planning across the government, asking everybody for their shutdown plan, we would be sending a negative signal, so we referred to it fondly as ‘the Fall working group,’” Koskinen said, to knowing chuckles from the audience of accountants. Internally, though, Koskinen says they joked it was more akin to “the trainwreck working group.”

There were two shutdowns around that time (one from November 1995 and another from December to January 1996), and “that whipsaw effect did not have a good impact on the employees,” Koskinen said.

With that in mind, he thinks “the morale issues and pressure on [IRS employees]” should be kept in the spotlight, since no past cohort has ever had to deal with so much at such a crucial time.

“I am confident [IRS employees are] going to do the best they can. I am also confident that the stress on them is probably greater than any of the previous experiences we all had, because this is kind of a combination of everything,” he said, citing the mass IRS layoffs and “complications from the new tax laws. And now you’ve got the longest shutdown in history in the middle of the preparation for that filing season.”

There’s one thing he’s confident about, though. Yes, the 2026 tax season will be rough, but “it won’t be the fault of the employees,” he stressed. “They’re going to do the best they can for you, best they can for taxpayers…and for the government.”