A recent effort to hire 5,000 new IRS employees has fallen flat so far, with less than 200 workers brought on board. The new plan “sounds like an extension of that plan and its logic,” said Chad Hooper, president of the Professional Managers Association, a group that represents non-union personnel.

But he said he had no specific knowledge of the new plan and seemed skeptical about how easily it could be fulfilled, given the recent hiring misfire.

“It’s unclear where the IRS believes these future employees are,” Hooper said.

Nevertheless, a large portion of the planned personnel surge is tabbed for reducing the massive accumulation of paperwork still awaiting processing, which dates back to last year.

The paper pileup includes at least 10 million individual tax returns and 4 million business tax returns, holding up refunds and credits they’ve expected since last year. Also in the backlog are some 8 million additional pieces of mail in a category that includes taxpayer responses to automated IRS letters they’ve received, often in error since they were sent.

“It is clear that understaffing in these areas contributes to the backlog in processing of tax returns and taxpayer correspondence,” Reardon said.

Starting this month, the IRS shifted 1,200 workers from their current jobs to deal with the backlog, through September, but extra personnel are needed for the agency to meet its goal of returning the backlog to a manageable level by the end of the year. In normal times, it’s less than a million.

IRS officials didn’t yet respond to questions about the hiring plans and details on other roles that could be filled by the new hires, who’d represent the most sizable increase in personnel at the agency in decades.

The IRS workforce currently sits at about 80,000, according to its website.

At its peak, the IRS had about 94,700 employees in 2010 and 2011, but by 2020, the workforce had fallen to less than 75,800. Retirement and attrition contributed, along with declining or flat appropriations from Congress that reduced spending on the agency by 20 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars.

IRS advocates are pressing lawmakers to approve more funding for the IRS to beef up its workforce further, shore up its hobbled information technology infrastructure and more as part of the annual appropriations process that’s under way. In addition, President Joe Biden and some Democrats on Capitol Hill are pushing for an extra $80 billion over a decade for the IRS, largely allocated for increased enforcement, though Republicans have stymied that proposal to date.