Here’s a sentence we’d never thought we’d write: the Internal Revenue Service now has a Chief Executive Officer.
The kind of title you’d expect to see on a LinkedIn profile for someone running a tech startup or a Fortune 500 company, not the federal agency responsible for collecting your taxes and sending you those delightful letters about documentation for your home office deduction.
But just a few weeks ago, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the creation of this entirely new position and promptly filled it with Frank Bisignano, a man whose résumé reads less like a typical Washington bureaucrat and more like a greatest hits album of American finance. And if you’re wondering what this means for you, the humble taxpayer who just wants to file your 1040 without having a panic attack — well, buckle up. We’re in uncharted territory.
The Man Who’s Running Two Agencies at Once
Let’s start with the obvious question: who is Frank Bisignano, and why is he apparently capable of holding down two of the most demanding jobs in government simultaneously?
Bisignano is currently the commissioner of the Social Security Administration, a job that involves overseeing benefits for roughly 70 million Americans. Now he’s also managing the day-to-day operations of the IRS, which processes about 160 million individual tax returns every year. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s approximately 230 million reasons to have an excellent calendar system.
Before entering public service, Bisignano spent four decades in the private sector, running some of the world’s largest financial institutions. He was the CEO of Fiserv, the planet’s biggest financial services technology company. Before that, he ran First Data and orchestrated its merger with Fiserv in 2019. He was also the co-Chief Operating Officer at J.P. Morgan Chase during the 2000s, where he ran the mortgage banking unit — a job that, in hindsight, involved navigating some rather interesting times in American finance.
The guy knows technology. He knows customer service. He knows how to run massive organizations that touch millions of people’s lives. Which, when you think about it, is precisely what both the IRS and Social Security do every single day.
To be sure, the announcement was not universally celebrated. Tax policy experts immediately raised concerns, questioning the legality of a new CEO role that appears to sidestep the Senate confirmation process required for an IRS commissioner. Critics also pointed to customer service issues and data security questions at the Social Security Administration under Bisignano’s leadership, worrying that those problems could be imported to the IRS. Others argue that having one person run two massive agencies creates a clear conflict of interest and concentrates enormous power over Americans’ financial data in the hands of a single, unelected official.
Why Does the IRS Need a CEO?
The IRS is not just a tax collection agency. It’s also a technology company, a customer service operation, a data security fortress, and a law enforcement agency all rolled into one. It processes more transactions in a week than most Fortune 500 companies handle in a year.
And if we’re being honest, it hasn’t always done this terribly well.
For years, taxpayers have complained about the IRS being impossible to reach by phone, about outdated technology that feels like it was designed during the Carter administration, and about confusing guidance that requires a law degree and a Ouija board to decipher. The agency has been understaffed, underfunded, and running on systems that, in some cases, still use COBOL — a programming language that predates the moon landing.
The creation of a CEO position signals that the Treasury Department is trying to run the IRS more like a modern organization and less like a government bureaucracy that moves at the speed of legislative sessions. Secretary Bessent emphasized three priorities: collections, privacy, and customer service. Translation: they want to collect taxes more efficiently, keep your data secure, and make dealing with the IRS less like navigating a Kafka novel.
What This Means for You
If you’re a taxpayer — and unless you’ve figured out some remarkable loophole, you probably are — this shift could mean several things:
- Better Technology: Bisignano’s entire career has been built on financial technology and digital transformation. Expect investments in modernizing IRS systems. This means better online tools, smoother e-filing, and the ability to talk to an actual human being when you call the IRS helpline. Revolutionary, we know.
- More Efficient Collections: The emphasis on “collections” should make everyone sit up a bit straighter. The IRS has been working with limited resources for years, which meant it often couldn’t pursue all the tax cheats and bad actors. With a focus on efficiency and optimization, the IRS is expected to improve at identifying and collecting unpaid taxes. If you’ve been playing fast and loose with your tax obligations, this might be a good time to reconsider your strategy.
- Customer Service as an Actual Goal: What if the IRS treated taxpayers like customers? Bisignano comes from industries where customer satisfaction actually matters, where companies live and die by their ability to serve people efficiently. The IRS has historically operated under a different set of incentives — mainly, “we’re the IRS and you’ll deal with us whether you like it or not.” That might be starting to change.
The Corporate Makeover of Government
There’s something undeniably American about appointing a private sector CEO to run a government agency with corporate efficiency in mind. It’s an experiment we’ve seen before with varying degrees of success. Sometimes, bringing in business leaders works brilliantly. Sometimes it crashes and burns because the government isn’t actually a business and operates under completely different constraints.
The IRS is in a unique position for this kind of transformation. It’s already part enforcement agency, part service organization. It needs to be both feared and helpful, authoritative and accessible. That’s a tricky balance, and it requires someone who understands both operational excellence and public service.
What Comes Next
The big question is whether this is a one-time appointment or the beginning of a broader restructuring of how the IRS operates. Will there be a Chief Technology Officer next? A Chief Customer Experience Officer? Is the IRS about to start having quarterly earnings calls?
More seriously, this appointment suggests that the government is taking the need for IRS modernization seriously, recognizing that the status quo isn’t working and that running a massive federal agency may require the same kind of strategic thinking and operational discipline as running a major corporation.
For taxpayers, this could be genuinely good news. A more efficient IRS could mean faster refunds, more precise guidance, better service, and fewer horror stories about people spending three hours on hold only to get disconnected. It could also mean better enforcement against tax cheats, which most honest taxpayers would support.
Of course, there’s also the possibility that this is all just window dressing, that nothing will really change, and that come next April, we’ll all still be pulling our hair out trying to figure out whether our home office deduction counts if we sometimes work from the couch.
But for now, at least, the IRS has a CEO, which is either a sign that the government is finally getting serious about modernization or evidence that we’re living in the strangest timeline.
Probably both.
