• The IRS fired probationary workers this week, claiming they weren't critical to tax filing season.
• The agency had already been struggling in recent years to keep up with tax return processing.
• One expert said there's no way to cut a large number of workers without affecting filing season.

Your tax return may languish on an empty desk at the Internal Revenue Service this season after the agency began firing workers this week.

An internal IRS email viewed by Business Insider said the agency would terminate probationary workers — typically employees who have been at the agency for less than a year — who were not "critical" to tax filing season.

Tax experts and IRS employees told BI they expected the terminations to result in delayed tax refunds, slower customer service, and a backlog in paperwork processing. Some spoke with BI under the condition of anonymity.

Natasha Sarin, a professor at Yale Law School, said there's "no way, in the middle of filing season, to cut a substantial number of IRS employees without having an impact on filing season," adding that it's an "all hands on deck" time at the agency.

Many Americans still file paper tax returns, a human resources worker at the IRS said, adding: "If there's not anyone there to process them, it's just going to be sitting."

A former Treasury official likened the situation to a business "eliminating your entire accounts receivable department," adding: "No business would say we have no interest in collecting the revenue that's due to us."

The IRS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, told reporters on Thursday that the estimated 3,500 firings "is a small number and probably you can get bigger, especially as we improve the IT at the IRS." He added that not all IRS employees working on taxes were "fully occupied."

In the wake of the pandemic, the IRS struggled with a backlog of millions of returns, taking months to process them, which caused economic hardship for some taxpayers.

Sarin, who served as a counselor to Janet Yellen when Yellen was the Treasury secretary, said that the terminations could throw the IRS back into the "dark ages." Taxpayers should be concerned about whether they'll be able to get in touch with the IRS, whether refunds will be processed in a timely manner, and whether the IRS website will malfunction during tax season.

A fired IRS worker said: "The long-term ramifications of this will be felt for decades."

They added: "There will continue to be processing delays due to incredibly outdated systems, and there will not be supported free filing for Americans due to budget cuts and lobbying by major tax software players."

"It's just going to slow the IRS down," one IRS worker who still has a job at the agency said, adding: "It's a shame that all the progress is going to reverse."

They were referencing increased funding from the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act, which was meant to mitigate staffing issues. Bolstered by the funding, hiring at the IRS in recent months focused on tax-evasion and fraud-detection staff.

Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, said during a press call on Thursday that the expected terminations could "disproportionately affect enforcement."

"When you underpay and understaff the IRS, the agency doesn't have the power or the resources it needs to go after wealthy tax evaders with their high-priced lawyers," Williamson said.

"It's going to be incredibly harmful to efficiency at the IRS," the former Treasury official told BI. If the agency can't keep up with existing efficiency programs — like using artificial intelligence to target audits better — compliance will be less effective, they said.

Over the past couple of weeks, various federal agencies have fired their probationary employees as part of President Donald Trump's efforts to slash government spending by reducing the federal workforce. BI previously spoke with over half a dozen fired workers at agencies, including the US Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy, who said they're planning to fight their terminations.

"We're not going to take this lying down," Melanie Mattox Green, a fired US Forest Service worker, told BI. "We all love our work, and we're planning on fighting and getting our jobs back."

The IRS HR employee said that these terminations, coupled with the federal hiring freeze, could put the IRS behind on its functions into next year.

"If you have filed, or will file a tax return, you are going to feel an impact," they said.

Are you a federal worker with a story or information to share? Contact these reporters via Signal at madisonhoff.06, julianakaplan.33, and asheffey.97, or via email at [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected].

• Douglas Elliman is one of the biggest names in real estate, but it has been touched by a scandal.
• Elliman's new CEO, Michael Liebowitz, explained how he'd improve the fortunes of the brokerage.
• An attorney for Howard Lorber, Elliman's former CEO, defended Lorber's tenure.

Michael Liebowitz, the new CEO of the residential brokerage firm Douglas Elliman, describes his relationship with Howard Lorber, the previous chief executive, as close.

Yet in a recent interview in his corner office overlooking Madison Avenue, Liebowitz sought to put some distance between himself and his predecessor, a longtime power player in the luxury brokerage business who left the firm abruptly in October.

"I'm very much an operator, which is a much different thing from Howard," Liebowitz said. "Howard was not an operational person at all."

Liebowitz said Lorber was "more of a front guy," suggesting he was less focused on Douglas Elliman's bottom line than pulling levers in his network of high-net-worth home sellers, buyers, and developers to help arrange deals and win business for the firm.

Liebowitz suggested that he was more interested in minding the company's financial performance.

"I watch the overhead, I watch the expenses," Liebowitz said. "I watch where we're spending money on. I look at return on investment."

Less than three months into his tenure, Liebowitz — a brokerage outsider whose background is in insurance sales — is familiarizing himself with one of the highest-profile players in luxury real estate while trying to steady the company after a moment of tumult.

The firm is a top seller of upscale homes in major markets like New York City and South Florida. Leading brokers at the firm, including Eleonora Srugo and Fredrik Eklund, have starred in popular real-estate-themed reality TV shows. The firm has also been involved in some of the most lucrative home sales of all time, including the hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin's purchase of a roughly $240 million Manhattan apartment in 2019.

More recently, it has been shaken by a raft of shocking charges against two former star brokers.

Lorber, who became the CEO in 2003, stepped down from his leadership role following an internal investigation in the aftermath of accusations of rape, drugging, and sexual assault against Tal and Oren Alexander, brothers who were top agents at Douglas Elliman for more than a decade.

Bloomberg News reported in November that Lorber disclosed during the investigation that he had consensual relationships with two brokers at the firm.

Revelations of Lorber's conduct and his close relationship with the Alexanders, who have since been arrested on federal criminal sex trafficking charges, bruised Douglas Elliman's reputation.

Two people who worked for Douglas Elliman during Lorber's tenure told Business Insider that there appeared to be a culture where professional boundaries and accountability were blurry. The Alexander brothers are fighting the charges and have denied the accusations against them, which have been brought forward by dozens of women, including some former colleagues at Douglas Elliman.

An attorney for Lorber disputed that characterization of Douglas Elliman's workplace during Lorber's tenure.

"Any suggestion that Mr. Lorber is responsible for a culture that promoted or enabled the kind of sociopathic acts presently alleged against the Alexander brothers is false," the attorney, Marc Kasowitz, said in a statement. Kasowitz also denied that Lorber's relationship with the Alexanders was closer than the connections he had with any other top broker at the firm.

"He did not have a close relationship with them, and his attendance at parties with them or at events they hosted does not evidence such a relationship," he said.

Kasowitz also challenged Liebowitz's description of Lorber's leadership.

"Mr. Liebowitz's suggestion that Mr. Lorber was not a good business manager is contradicted by Douglas Elliman's track record, as reflected in its public filings, of profitable growth over many years with Mr. Lorber as its chairman and CEO," Kasowitz wrote. "Under his leadership, the company became one of the largest residential brokerage companies in the New York metropolitan area, it expanded into new markets across the country, and it achieved remarkable growth and revenues."

After going public three years ago, Douglas Elliman posted annual operating losses in 2022 and 2023 amid weakness in the residential market. In the third quarter of 2024, its most recent financial report, it reported a net loss of almost $27.5 million. The company's stock price has slid by 84% since its public offering. Kasowitz noted that the company's performance had been challenged by higher interest rates and a nationwide dip in residential sales that affected rivals as well.

Lorber attracted criticism from investors over lucrative bonuses and other perks, including payments for a private jet, that seemed out of step with the company's declining fortunes.

The new CEO promised to get the company back on track by "getting our expense structure to where we think it should be" through cost cutting, while also building other service lines to diversify and expand its revenue.

"This brand, look at what was thrown at it," Liebowitz said. "We're still doing new business every single day."

From Staten Island to the top of luxury real estate

Liebowitz grew up in Staten Island and began his career operating property- and casualty-insurance businesses. He was appointed to the Douglas Elliman board after it went public at the end of 2021.

Liebowitz's ascension to CEO has been well received by some investors.

Brad Tirpak, an Aspen-based activist shareholder in Douglas Elliman who led a public campaign last summer that criticized Lorber's compensation and spending, said he was confident that Liebowitz would turn the company around.

He said that he texted Liebowitz shortly after his appointment and that "he responded in 15 minutes" and "offered to have a phone call that night."

Tirpak noted that the new boss purchased about $1.8 million worth of Douglas Elliman stock in November, which a public filing disclosed was sold to him by Lorber.

"He wrote a check — he put his money, his reputation on the line," Tirpak said. "Look, he's going to make some mistakes, and I don't know any CEOs that don't. But I think he's going to look at it and he's going to be trying to build shareholder value."

While Lorber was a beloved figure inside the firm, several brokers interviewed by BI expressed optimism about Liebowitz.

"Howard was very much a hands-on chairman, which I think was really nice," Frances Katzen, a successful New York broker at Douglas Elliman, said.

Liebowitz is "someone who's very smart, who is also very strategic — setting up systems and leadership changes that I think will make a meaningful difference," Katzen added.

Liebowitz said he had spent much of his time so far visiting Douglas Elliman offices across the country.

"I have visited almost the whole company," he said. "I've met thousands of agents."

Fast changes in the C-suite

Liebowitz said he wanted to upend Douglas Elliman's top-down management style and was creating a 15-person "agent board of directors" that would regularly confer with him and management and "be involved in major decision-making on a granular basis within the company."

"We want the agents bought into the things that we're doing," Liebowitz said. "The agents of this company are going to be assisting and helping me run this business."

The new CEO is trying to create broker buy-in at a precarious moment. Some prominent agents, including Tracy Tutor, a top broker who accused Oren Alexander of drugging her at a dinner, have recently exited. An attorney for Oren Alexander didn't respond to a request for a comment.

"I wished her well," Liebowitz said of Tutor's departure. "If I saw Tracy in a restaurant, I'd walk over and say hello."

"I wish Michael the best," Tutor told BI. "Other than that, I have no comment."

Liebowitz insisted that the firm's broker "retention has been great" and that developers were eager to hire the firm to help it sell new projects — a key area of its business.

Already the new CEO has made quick changes in the company's C-suite. In October, Scott Durkin, an executive who oversaw the company's brokerage business, was fired. The following month, David Ballard, its chief technology officer, left. Rumors of dismissals to come have swirled as Liebowitz puts his stamp on the company.

"Listen, the changes that we've made have been positive changes," Liebowitz said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has strong words for the former board members who abruptly fired him late last November. “[A]ll those people that I feel, like, really f—ed me and f—ed the company were gone, and now I had to clean up their mess,” he told Bloomberg in a wide-ranging interview. Just over a year […]

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• "Quiet vacationing," "coffee badging," and "ghost jobs" were part of the corporate lexicon in 2024.
• These are just some of the trends that came to dominate our conversations around work.
• Here's a look back at work in 2024.

Ghost jobs. Coffee badging. Quiet firing. Quiet vacationing.

The buzziest workplace trends this year didn't just become well-known tropes but also highlighted an ongoing power struggle between workers and bosses after the pandemic shook up the way people do their jobs.

The year's biggest movements reflect "shifts in work models, technological integration, and employee expectations," says Lauren Winans, CEO and HR consultant at Next Level Benefits.

While some of these are by no means new fads, they all featured prominently in the discourse around work this year. Here are the trends that dominated the cultural conversation in 2024:

Ghost jobs

Ghost jobs are nothing new but got a lot of attention this year.

These are roles which employers claim to be looking to fill even though they may not actually be hiring for such positions.

Employers may list ghost jobs for a few reasons. They might want to suggest they're doing well and growing; they could be trying to ready a talent pool for actual positions opening in the future; or they may want to imply to overworked employees that they'll get some additional help soon.

Quiet vacationing

This one pretty much explains itself, but just in case: When employees go on vacation without using any time off or telling their bosses, they're said to be quiet vacationing.

RTO

Return-to-office mandates continued rolling out at big firms this year. Amazon, one of the country's biggest employers, became one of the highest-profile companies to announce a full 5-day-a-week return to the office. (Its implementation has been delayed for some employees though, due to a lack of space.)

Hushed hybrid

As employers tightened the reins on remote work, some employees started carving out a new working arrangement under the table.

Enter the hushed hybrid schedule, in which employees skirt RTO mandates by getting their manager's approval to continue working from home on days they're technically required to be in the office.

Managers, for their part, might agree to do this to keep their employees happy (or to keep them, period). They also probably have a more personal connection with the workers affected by a mandate than the executives enforcing it. And of course, managers who are themselves opposed to RTO plans might also cut employees some slack out of sympathy.

Coffee badging

Another method of evading RTO is coffee badging — though it still technically requires that an employee return to the office.

The practice involves going to work to swipe your badge so your attendance is logged. But instead of spending the rest of the workday there, you kill some time by grabbing a coffee, or showing face with a quick lap around the office, before returning home to do most of your actual work there.

PIPs

Performance improvement plans, or PIPs, usually consist of a series of goals set for an employee to improve in areas where a boss says they're underperforming. If they're not completed in the allotted time, usually a few months or less, the employee will face termination.

PIPs are certainly not unique this year but statistically have been more frequently issued in recent years. They got renewed attention in 2024 as part of the discussion around ways employers trim headcount unannounced.

Quiet firing, silent layoffs, and stealth sackings

Yes, these are all somehow different things.

Between RTO mandates and PIPs, "quiet firing," which gained a lot of buzz in recent years, stayed in the spotlight in 2024. It refers to a boss or employer's unspoken attempt to encourage employees to quit by making the role more uncomfortable, as opposed to facing the monetary and reputational costs associated with explicitly laying them off.

Related phrases include "silent layoffs," which refers to giving employees severance packages but asking them to be discreet about their exiting the firm.

There's also "stealth sackings," coined by the Financial Times to describe firing employees over minor offenses. The newspaper cited Meta's dismissal of two dozen staff for using $25 GrubHub meal credits to buy non-food items as an example, and EY's firing of dozens of staffers for watching multiple online training courses simultaneously.

Other key trends

There were also other trends that, though they lack flashy names, also shaped how we worked in 2024.

The main one, of course, was the growing adoption of AI in the workplace, the "standout trend" of the year, according to Amy Schabacker Dufrane, CEO of the Human Resource Certification Institute and the Human Resource Standards Institute.

Winans says other trends included an emphasis on upskilling and reskilling to keep up with technological advancements and changing job requirements, as well as increased labor organizing efforts.

What can we expect in 2025?

Next year, the integration of AI at work will no doubt continue.

"Employees expect training and transparency about AI's role, while employers navigate concerns about job security and ethics," says Dufrane.

Other themes to watch include an emphasis on skills-based hiring and employee wellness programs, as well as ongoing changes to companies' ESG and DEI strategies.

Employee engagement in the US hitting an 11-year low in 2024, coupled with the possibility it may be easier to change jobs in 2025 mean that revenge quitting may also be the next big thing in workplace trends come next year, according to a Glassdoor report.

The phrase refers to dissatisfied employees being vocal with their discontent and resigning, often with little or no notice, knowing it could negatively impact their employer.

Heading into 2025, "monitoring employee satisfaction will be more important than ever," says Dufrane.

"We may see an increase in trends like bare-minimum attendance or revenge quitting as return-to-work mandates require employees to be on-site more than the post-COVID norm," she adds. "Prioritizing open communication, as well as autonomy, fairness, and a high-trust environment, will be critical for organizations to succeed."

Intel has announced that CEO Pat Gelsinger has retired, effective December 1, and stepped down from the company’s board of directors. Intel execs David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus have been named interim co-CEOs. Zinsner is Intel’s CFO, while Holthaus is GM of Intel’s client computing group. Holthaus has also been appointed to the newly […]

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